Non-IT Energy Accounting in Virtualized Datacenter

Energy accounting plays a crucial role in datacenter energy management, wherein the energy consumption of non-IT units (e.g., UPS and cooling system) makes up a significant portion. However, it is challenging to fairly account for non-IT energy on an individual VM basis, because the non-IT units are shared by multiple VMs in a virtualized datacenter and only the system-level non-IT energy consumption can be measured. Existing policies, e.g., equally or proportionally allocating non-IT energy to VMs based on their IT energy, are not fair, in the sense that they can not satisfy a set of desired axiomatic principles of fair allocation. In this paper, we propose LEAPS, a Lightweight Energy Accounting Policy based on a provably fair methodology called Shapley value. We evaluate it using real-world datacenter trace and demonstrate that, compared to original Shapley value approach that has an exponential complexity, LEAPS yields almost the same energy accounting result within a maximum relative error less than 6.97%, while having a negligible computation time.