Power-Efficient Response Time Guarantees for Virtualized Enterprise Servers

Both power and performance are important concerns for enterprise data centers. While various management strategies have been developed to effectively reduce server power consumption by transitioning hardware components to lower-power states, they cannot be directly applied to today's data centers that rely on virtualization technologies. Virtual machines running on the same physical server are correlated, because the state transition of any hardware component will affect the application performance of all the virtual machines. As a result, reducing power solely based on the performance level of one virtual machine may cause another to violate its performance specification.