A Low-Cost Power Measuring Technique for Virtual Machine in Cloud Environments

With the development of cloud computing, high energy consumption issue has attracted more and more attentions recently. To achieve the goal of energy conservation, accurately measuring the power consumption of distributed resource is of significant importance. Conventional power models can only provide fine-grained power measurement for physical devices instead of virtualized resources. In this paper, we proposed a novel power measuring technique, which uses performance monitoring counters (PMC) as basic indicator of virtual machine’s power consumption. Meanwhile, we also designed a scheduling algorithm to reduce the measuring errors caused by recursive power consumption. Theoretical analysis indicates that the proposed algorithm can provide bounded error when metering virtual machine’s power. Massive experiments are conducted by using various benchmarks on different platforms, and the results shown the proposed technique is effective and low-cost for measuring the power consumption of virtualized resources in large-scale cloud systems.