Energy consumption estimation of virtual machines

Energy consumption of IT increased continously during the last decades. Numerous works have been accomplished for improving energy efficiency of hardware whereas software energy efficiency has been ignoried for a long time. This contribution presents a novel approach for estimating energy consumption of applications in different execution environments. The system is the basis for automatic optimization of software execution in an energy-efficient way by finding the best-suiting host computer. Thus, it opens novel ways to further improve energy-efficiency of IT systems. Exemplary, the approach is tested in a virtualized data center environment, where virtual machines are the applications. The presented approach is a vehicle for automatically finding the most energy-efficient host machine for any virtual machine system.The paper presents a new algorithm for estimating virtual machine power consumption and shows the accuracy of the presented approach by means of measurements.