Abstract

Computing servers generally have a narrow dynamic power range. For instance, even completely idle servers consume between 50 % and 70 % of their peak power. Since the us-age rate of the server has the main influence on its power consumption, energy-efficiency is achieved whenever the uti-lization of the servers that are powered on reaches its peak. For this purpose, enterprises generally adopt the following technique: consolidate as many workloads as possible via virtualization in a minimum amount of servers (i.e. maxi-mize utilization) and power down the ones that remain idle (i.e. reduce power consumption). However, such approach can severely impact servers ’ performance and reliability. In this paper, we propose a methodology to determine the ideal values for power consumption and utilization for