Agile, Efficient Virtualization Power Management

One of the main driving forces of the growing adoption of virtualization is its dramatic simplification of the pro-visioning and dynamic management of IT resources. By decoupling running entities from the underlying physical re-sources, and by providing easy-to-use controls to allocate, deallocate and migrate virtual machines (VMs) across phys-ical boundaries, virtualization opens up new opportunities for improving overall system resource use and power effi-ciency. While a range of techniques for dynamic, distributed resource management of virtualized systems have been pro-posed and have seen their widespread adoption in enterprise systems, similar techniques for dynamic power management have seen limited acceptance. The main barrier to dynamic, power-aware virtualization management stems not from the limitations of virtualization, but rather from the underlying physical systems; and in particular, the high latency and energy cost of power state change actions suited for virtual-ization power management. In this work, we first explore the feasibility of low-latency power states for enterprise server systems and demonstrate, with real prototypes, their quantitative energy-performance trade offs compared to traditional server power states. Then, we demonstrate an end-to-end power-aware virtualization management solution leveraging these states, and evaluate the dramatically-favorable power-performance characteris-tics achievable with such systems. We present, via both real system implementations and scale-out simulations, that vir-tualization power management with low-latency server po-wer states can achieve comparable overheads as base distri-buted resource management in virtualized systems, and thus can benefit from the same level of adoption, while delivering close to energy-proportional power efficiency. 1