Effect of Memory Allocation on Power Consumption in Virtual Machine: Case Study Microsoft Hyper-V

Abstract

Virtualization technology consolidates a number of servers to work together in a single hardware platform. Since memory is a shared resource in the virtual environment, it is necessary to allocate memory to all virtual servers. Initially, static memory allocation was the only way to allocate memory to virtual servers. At present, it is possible to have dynamic memory allocation, which has been introduced by Microsoft Hyper-V. However, this allocation requires some resources to be performed that cause overhead costs regarding energy consumption. Therefore, this research was performed in order to find differences in the power consumption in the virtual server environment when using static and dynamic memory allocation. The experiment was set up to measure power consumption on I/O and memory-intensive applications in the same virtual server environment; one experiment used static memory allocation and the other used dynamic memory allocation. We found that the power consumption of the dynamic memory allocation was 5–10% more than that of the static memory allocation, and this number can be reduced to 0.16–1.02% by setting the memory buffer value to 20%. In application requirements focusing on energy savings, it is recommended that the static memory allocation should be applied to both I/O and memory-intensive applications . If the dynamic memory allocation is a must in virtual machines, we recommend setting up the memory buffer value to 20% for the best results in terms of energy consumption with virtual servers.