UVMPM: A Unitary Approach for VM Power Metering Based on Performance Profiling

Energy consumption in contemporary data centers is continuously surging in an unsustainable way, and tremendous efforts have been devoted both from industry and academia to address this issue. The pervasive utilization of virtual machines (VMs) in Cloud computing offers the service provider an opportunity to consolidate various workloads onto fewer servers, thus improving resource utilization as well as eliminating idle power consumption. Meanwhile, over-provisioning of VMs on individual servers may cause more power to be consumed by the cooling systems and imbalance on power distribution systems, which increases the possibility of system failures due to overheating. Therefore, power capping is widely adopted to reinforce the upper-bound power consumption of a single server taking the advantage of dynamic frequency voltage scaling (DVFS) technology which is extensively supported by the server manufacturers.