Virtual machine power metering and provisioning

Virtualization is often used in cloud computing platforms for its several advantages in efficiently managing resources. However, virtualization raises certain additional challenges, and one of them is lack of power metering for virtual machines (VMs). Power management requirements in modern data centers have led to most new servers providing power usage measurement in hardware and alternate solutions exist for older servers using circuit and outlet level measurements. However, VM power cannot be measured purely in hardware. We present a solution for VM power metering, named Joulemeter. We build power models to infer power consumption from resource usage at runtime and identify the challenges that arise when applying such models for VM power metering. We show how existing instrumentation in server hardware and hypervisors can be used to build the required power models on real platforms with low error. Our approach is designed to operate with extremely low runtime overhead while provid...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CLOUD
• Authors: Aman Kansal, Feng Zhao, Jie Liu, Nupur Kothari, Arka A. Bhattacharya
• Keywords: CLOUD 2010, Data Centers, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Power Models, VM Power