Enabling power-awareness for the Xen hypervisor

Abstract

Virtualization allows simultaneous execution of multi-tenant workloads on the same platform, either a server or an embedded system. Unfortunately, it is non-trivial to attribute hardware events to multiple virtual tenants, as some system's metrics relate to the whole system (e.g., RAPL energy counters). Virtualized environments have then a rather incomplete picture of how tenants use the hardware, limiting their optimization capabilities. Thus, we propose XeM-Power, a lightweight monitoring solution for Xen that precisely accounts hardware events to guest workloads. It also enables attribution of CPU power consumption to individual tenants. We show that XeMPower introduces negligible overhead in power consumption, aiming to be a reference design for power-aware virtualized environments.