VirtualPower: coordinated power management in virtualized enterprise systems

Power management has become increasingly necessary in large-scale datacenters to address costs and limitations in cooling or power delivery. This paper explores how to integrate power management mechanisms and policies with the virtualization technologies being actively deployed in these environments. The goals of the proposed VirtualPower approach to online power management are (i) to support the isolated and independent operation assumed by guest virtual machines (VMs) running on virtualized platforms and (ii) to make it possible to control and globally coordinate the effects of the diverse power management policies applied by these VMs to virtualized resources. To attain these goals, VirtualPower extends to guest VMs ‘soft’ versions of the hardware power states for which their policies are designed. The resulting technical challenge is to appropriately map VM-level updates made to soft power states to actual changes in the states or in the allocation of underlying virtualized ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SOSP
• Authors: Ripal Nathuji, Karsten Schwan
• Keywords: Online Power Management, Operating System, Power Management Mechanisms, Power Management Policies, SOSP 2007