PMC-based power measuring technique in virtualisation environments

Abstract

Recently, resource virtualisation technology has been widely applied in many high-performance datacentres. However, measuring the power of individual virtual machine is still a challenging issue. In this work, we proposed a novel technique which uses performance monitor counters PMC for power metering on per-VM basis. Unlike the classical utilisation-based techniques which can only provide coarse-grained power metering with unbounded error, our approach can increase the accuracy when metering virtual machine power consumption by bounded error range. The experiments conducted by various benchmarks on different platforms show that the proposed approach outperforms existing approaches in terms of accuracy and power-efficiency.