Towards Prediction of Power Consumption of Virtual Machines for Varying Loads

Power management and load balancing in data centers are becoming critical with the growing size of the infrastructure. In front of an increasing number of cloud networks, virtual machines (VMs) and containers, smart management and control decisions are required, in order to instantiate or mobilize these virtual components. As regards reducing power consumption, it is also essential to consolidate virtual resources on the minimum possible number of servers compatible with performance requirements. In such a dynamic scenario, estimating the power that can be ascribed to a specific virtual component and its relation with the offered workload could be beneficial for optimized resource scheduling. Predicting the power consumption caused by a specific virtual component is however challenging. In this paper, two power models that relate a VM workload with the fraction of power consumed attributable to the VM are developed based on power profiling of a server. The accuracy of the proposed models is improved approximately by 3% compared to other existing models.