An Empirical Investigation of the Impact of Server Virtualization on Energy Efficiency for Green Data Center

The swift adoption of cloud services is accelerating the deployment of data centers. These data centers are consuming a large amount of energy, which is expected to grow dramatically under the existing technological trends. Therefore, research efforts are in great need to architect green data centers with better energy efficiency. The most prominent approach is the consolidation enabled by virtualization. However, little effort has been paid to the potential overhead in energy usage and the throughput reduction for virtualized servers. Clear understanding of energy usage on virtualized servers lays out a solid foundation for green data center architecture. This paper investigates how virtualization affects the energy usage in servers under different task loads, aiming to understand a fundamental trade-off between the energy saving from consolidation and the detrimental effects from virtualization. We adopt an empirical approach to measure the server energy usage with different configurations, including a benchmark case and two alternative hypervisors. Based on the collected data, we report a few findings on the impact of virtualization on server energy usage and their implications to green data center architecture. We envision that these technical insights would bring tremendous value propositions to green data center architecture and operations.