How Much Does a VM Cost? Energy-Proportional Accounting in VM-Based Environments

The costs of current data centers are mostly driven by their energy consumption (specifically by the air conditioning, computing and networking infrastructure). Yet, current pricing models are usually static and rarely consider the facilities' energy consumption per user. The challenge is to provide a fair and predictable model to attribute the overall energy costs per virtual machine (VM). Current pay-as-you-go models of Cloud providers allow users to easily know how much their computing will cost. However, this model is not fully transparent as to where the costs come from (e.g., energy). In this paper we introduce EPAVE, a model for Energy-Proportional Accounting in VM-based Environments. EPAVE allows transparent, reproducible and predictive cost calculation for users and for Cloud providers. We show these characteristics of EPAVE by a number of use cases in heterogeneous data centers and discuss the applicability of EPAVE.