Energy-efficient storage in virtual machine environments

Abstract

Current trends in increasing storage capacity and virtualization of resources combined with the need for energy efficiency put a challenging task in front of system designers. Previous studies have suggested many approaches to reduce hard disk energy dissipation in native OS environments; however, those mechanisms do not perform well in virtual machine environments because a virtual machine (VM) and the virtual machine monitor (VMM) that runs it have different semantic contexts. This paper explores the disk I/O activities between VMM and VMs using trace driven simulation to understand the I/O behavior of the VM system. Subsequently, this paper proposes three mechanisms to address the isolation between VMM and VMs, and increase the burstiness of hard disk accesses to increase energy efficiency of a hard disk. Compared to standard shutdown mechanisms, with eight VMs the proposed mechanisms reduce disk spin-ups, increase the disk sleep time, and reduce energy consumption by 14.8% with only 0.5% increase in execution time. We implemented the proposed mechanisms in Xen and validated our simulation results.

Deduplication-Based Energy Efficient Storage System in Cloud Environment

“…In VM storage, even the structure is different, some researchers use a similar method to reduce energy consumption with original storage system. Ye et al [22] propose a mechanism to improve HDD energy dissipation by adjustment of buffer cache flush to save disk energy and implement their design in the virtual machine monitor (VMM). Stoess et al [23] also insert a framework in VMM to distinguish two different power states, which is capable of enforcing power limits of guest VM.…”

Thermal Modeling and Analysis of Cloud Data Storage Systems

“…Solutions that are able to reduce energy consumption in the virtual machine (VM) environments have been presented [21], [22]. Liu et al proposed a GreenCloud architecture, in which the power consumption can be minimized without penalty of performance degradation [21].…”

“…Ye et al explored energy-efficient techniques on virtual machine environments [22]. Since existing energy-efficient techniques cannot be simply applied in VM environments due to the difference of semantic contexts, on which VM and VM monitor are running, they proposed a mechanism that is able to increase energy efficiency of a hard disk by reducing the number of spinups and increasing disk sleep time.…”