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Executive summary
5 Virtual machine power mapping and utilization in OpenManage Enterprise Power Manager
Executive summary
In Next Generation Data Centers (NGDC) paradigm, virtualization and automation are the key foundations
and capabilities that are considered by the cloud providers. With virtualization, the hardware users can be
separated from the application users that allows system configuration, monitoring, and management to be
homogenized and automated across all data centers.
Followings are the key benefits for NGDC paradigm from monitoring, managing and measuring the power
usage of virtualized systems:
• The use of virtual machines allows you to have safe isolation of multiple workloads on a single device
or share resources among multiple devices to work as one entity and give a seamless user
experience. This results in an improved resource utilization with existing devices. However, the lack
of visibility into virtual machine power usage takes away the advantages of server power metering
that is available without virtualization.
• Sometimes, a virtual machine may be shut down or migrated to a different server having more
capacity if the virtual machine is exhausting the resources of the current server. This way you can use
the server’s resources effectively. In addition to this, datacenter administrators can measure how
much energy the software consumes when executed on a physical server but cannot measure the
resource consumption when running on a virtual machine.
• The limitation of using virtual machines is that we have no visibility to the virtual machine’s resource
consumptions. This limitation cripples the developer's ability to optimize the software for lower power
consumption.
• To evaluate which workloads can be consolidated to which servers, capacity planning and workload
analysis becomes the key parameters for datacenter users.
The virtual machine feature makes Power Manager plugin eligible in computing power utilization metrics for
virtual machines and can be considered as the first step into virtualization and NGDC space. However, virtual
machine power utilization will be an approximate or estimated value and is computed with the consideration of
virtual machine CPU utilization and total power consumed by the server at a particular point of time.