Energy Management for Hypervisor-Based Virtual Machines

Current approaches to power management are based on operating systems with full knowledge of and full control over the underlying hardware; the distributed nature of multi-layered virtual machine environments renders such approaches insufficient. In this paper, we present a novel framework for energy management in modular, multi-layered operating system structures. The framework provides a unified model to partition and distribute energy, and mechanisms for energy-aware resource accounting and allocation. As a key property, the framework explicitly takes the recursive energy consumption into account, which is spent, e.g., in the virtualization layer or subsequent driver components. Our prototypical implementation targets hypervisor-based virtual machine systems and comprises two components: a host-level subsystem, which controls machine-wide energy constraints and enforces them among all guest OSes and service components, and, complementary, an energy-aware guest operating system, ca...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: USENIX
• Authors: Jan Stoess, Christian Lang, Frank Bellosa
• Keywords: Energy Management, Operating System, Operating Systems, USENIX 2007, Virtual Machine