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Energy Efficiency of Server Virtualization

Authors:
Jukka Kommeri
Tapio Niemi
Olli Helin

Keywords: energy-efficiency; server consolida- tion; xen; kvm; invenio; cmssw

Abstract:
The need for computing power keeps on growing. The rising energy expenses of data centers have made server consolidation and virtualization important research areas. Virtualization and its performance have received a lot of attention and several studies can be found on performance. So far researches have not studied the overall performance and energy efficiency of server consolidation. In this paper we study the effect of server consolidation on energy efficiency with an emphasis on quality of service. We have studied this with several synthetic benchmarks and with realistic server load by performing a large set of measurements. We found out that energy-efficiency depends on the load of the virtualized service and the number of virtualized servers. Idle virtual servers do not increase the consumption much, but on heavy load it makes more sense to share hardware resources among fewer virtual machines.

Pages: 90 to 95

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012

Publication date: March 25, 2012

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-412X

ISBN: 978-1-61208-189-2

Location: St. Maarten, The Netherlands Antilles

Dates: from March 25, 2012 to March 30, 2012