Power consumption measurements of virtual machines

The environment sustainability is one of the main directions of intervention for all developed countries. Solutions for alternative energies generation and energy reduction are already discussed. Furthermore, energy efficiency has become an important aspect in data centers and large server systems. Virtualization is one of the main research directions for both large scale data centers and servers. This paper explores how virtualization solutions influence the power consumption of physical systems they are implemented on and which is the most effective way to test and measure the energy efficiency of these solutions. In our tests we used two physical machines (one laptop and one desktop), both running Windows and Linux operating systems and we selected the VMWare virtualization solution.