Power consumption of virtual machines with network transactions: Measurement and improvements

There have been significant studies on virtual machines (VMs), including their power consumption in performing different types of tasks. The VM's power consumption with network transactions, however, has seldom been examined. This paper presents an empirical study on the power consumption of typical virtualization packages while performing network tasks. We find that both Hardware Virtualization and Paravirtualization add considerable energy overhead, affecting both sending and receiving, and a busy virtualized web-server may consume 40% more energy than its non-virtualized counterparts. Our detailed profiling on packet path reveals that a VM can take 5 times more cycles to deliver a packet than a bare-metal machine, and is also much less efficient on caching. Without fundamental changes to the hypervisor-based VM architecture, we show that the use of adaptive packet buffering potentially reduces the overhead. Its practicality and effectiveness in power saving are validated through driver-level implementation and experiments.