The ongoing trends in cloud computing demonstrate increasing need for efficient, yet economical data centers. Thus, recently the research community has focused its efforts on frameworks for optimised usage of the available resources that will result with energy-efficient and highly effective data centers. Toward this goal, in this paper we present a community-based framework for virtual machine placement inside a cloud data center. The framework is based on the complex network structural property of grouping tightly coupled nodes, and a matching process that maps virtual to physical communities while employing different optimisation functions on different hierarchy levels. The presented simulation results of the framework application reflect its high usage potential achieved by improvement in communication efficiency and reduced power consumption compared to the traditional heuristics.