VM Power Metering: Feasibility and Challenges

This paper explores the feasibility of and challenges in develop-ing methods for black-box monitoring of a VM’s power usage at runtime, on shared virtualized compute platforms, including those with complex memory hierarchies. We demonstrate that VM-level power utilization can be accurately estimated, or es-timated 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 con-trolledmanner. Our methodology is evaluated on core i7 and core2 x86 platforms, running synthetic and SPEC benchmarks. 1