There have been significant studies onvirtual 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