vGreen: A System for Energy-Efficient Management of Virtual Machines

In this article, we present vGreen, a multitiered software system for energy-efficient virtual machine management in a clustered virtualized environment. The system leverages the use of novel hierarchical metrics that work across the different abstractions in a virtualized environment to capture power and performance characteristics of both the virtual and physical machines. These characteristics are then used to implement policies for scheduling and power management of virtual machines across the cluster. We show through real implementation of the system on a state-of-the-art testbed of server machines that vGreen improves both average performance and system-level energy savings by close to 40% across benchmarks with varying characteristics.