VM power metering

Abstract

This paper explores the feasibility of and challenges in developing methods for black-box monitoring of the power usage of a virtual machine (VM) at run-time, on shared virtualized compute platforms, including those with complex memory hierarchies. We demonstrate that VM-level power utilization can be accurately estimated, or estimated with accuracy with bound error margins. The use of bounds permits more lightweight online monitoring of fewer events, while relaxing the fidelity of the estimates in a controlled manner. Our methodology is evaluated on the Intel Core i7 and Core2 x86-64 platforms, running synthetic and SPEC benchmarks.