ClientVisor: leverage COTS OS functionalities for power management in virtualized desktop environment

As an emerging trend, virtualization is more and more widely used in today's computing world. But, the introduc-tion of virtual machines bring trouble for the power man-agement (PM for short), since the operating system can not directly access and control the hardware as before. Solu-tions were proposed to manage the power in the server con-solidation case. However, such solutions are VMM-centric: the VMM gathers the PM decisions of the guests as hints, and makes the final decision to manipulate the hardware. These solutions do not fit well for the virtualized desktop environment, which is highly interactive with the users. In this paper, we propose a novel solution, called Cli-entVisor, to manage the power in the virtualized desktop environment. The key idea of our scheme is to leverage the functionalities of the Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) operating system, which actually interacts with the user, to manage the power of the processor and the peripheral de-vices in all possible cases. VMM coordinates the PM deci-sions of the guests only at the key points. By prototype implementation and experiments, we find our scheme re-sults in 22% lower power consumption in the static power usage scenario, and about 8% lower in the dynamic sce-nario than the corresponding cases of Xen. Moreover, the experimental data shows that the deployment of our scheme will not deteriorate the user experience.