The high energy consumption of data center is a serious problem to be solved. Especially as the development of cloud computing,more resources are centralized to the clouds. Constructing green data centers and achieving power cost and carbon footprint reduction became research hotspots in recent years.Energy consumption of data centers consists of computational energy and cooling energy.Thermal management for data centers mainly target reducing cooling energy and provide new solutions to achieve green computing.This paper presents a review of the recent research work of thermal management from the perspectives of status monitoring,thermal modeling,thermal management policies and thermal management evaluations.We propose the overall architecture of thermal management of green data center,and summarize its general framework of distributed monitoring system.We classify the existing thermal management policies into two classes:single-node case and multiple-node case,compare the complexity, flexibility and effectiveness of the existing policies,and analyze their advantages and limitations. This paper summarizes the existing evaluating approaches proposing a new taxonomy of three categories:global energy consumption evaluation,refrigerating efficiency evaluation,and thermal/temperature evaluation.Finally,ten possible research directions are suggested for future research in this field.