Towards a Framework for Carbon-Aware Virtual Machine Management

Software workloads deployed on virtual machines in the cloud are driving the ever-increasing data center energy use. For our sustainable future, there is an urgent need of a framework that can guide the end-user in optimizing their virtual machine deployments. In this paper, we introduce a preliminary sustainability-focused framework that generates contextualized recommendations for virtual machine management, thereby leading to reduction in the energy consumption and carbon emissions. The recommendations provided by our prototype, as part of our initial case study, predict promising potential savings in carbon emissions.