Power Consumption of Virtual Machine Live Migration in Clouds

Virtualization Technology has been employed increasingly widely in modern data centers in order to improve its energy efficiency. In particular, the capability of virtual machine(VM) migration brings multiple benefits for such as resources(CPU, memory, et al.) distribution, energy aware consolidation. However, the migration of virtual machines itself brings extra power consumption. For this reason, a better understanding of its effect on system power consumption is highly desirable. In this paper, we present a power consumption evaluation on the effects of live migration of VMs. Results show that the power overhead of migration is much less in the scenario of employing the strategy of consolidation than the regular deployment without using consolidation. Our results are based on the typical physical server, the power of which is linear model of CPU utilization percentage.