Towards power efficient consolidation and distribution of virtual machines

Abstract

The need for power conservation in today's world is continually growing in importance due to increasing energy costs and the desire to conserve natural resources. Energy conservation extends into computer systems because of these systems' performance demands, energy costs, and the growth of environmental awareness. Meanwhile, computer virtualization is growing in popularity in today's computer systems because it allows for the consolidation of multiple servers onto one larger server. Data centers and computational clusters use virtualization because of the many benefits it offers over the use of traditional stand-alone servers such as ease of management, enhanced security, and reduced costs. Virtual machines can be consolidated to obtain maximum power efficiency by taking into account the attributes of applications running in virtual machines. The contribution of this paper is the study of the relationship between applications running in virtual machines, and the effect they have on power consumption. Optimal power efficiency is obtained when virtual machines are consolidated so that all the resources for a given host are fully utilized. This will be used in the goal of building an energy efficient system model and load-balancing algorithm for use in data centers and computational clusters.