Energy-proportional profiling and accounting in heterogeneous virtualized environments

•EPAVE: how much does a VM cost?•PowerIndex: minimal offline profiling for energy estimation.•EPAVE+PowerIndex: towards energy-aware pricing models. The costs of current data centers are mostly driven by their energy consumption (specifically by the air conditioning, computing and networking infrastructure). Yet, current pricing models are usually static and rarely consider the facilities’ energy consumption per user. The challenge is to provide a fair and predictable model to attribute the overall energy costs per virtual machine (VM) in heterogeneous environments. In this paper we introduce EPAVE, a model for Energy-Proportional Accounting in VM-based Environments. EPAVE allows transparent, reproducible and predictive cost calculation for users and for Cloud providers. It provides a full-cost model that does not account only for the dynamic energy consumption of a given VM, but also includes the proportional static cost of using a Cloud infrastructure. It comes with PowerIndex, a profiling and estimation model, which is able to profile the energy cost of a VM on a given server architecture and can then estimate its energy cost on a different one. We provide performance results of PowerIndex on real hardware, and we discuss the use cases and applicability of EPAVE.