ekt's - Virtual Infrastructure GReen meteR

The Ekt's - Virtual Infrastructure Green meteR is a set of scripts for estimating, in real time, and with appropriate assumptions, the power savings a virtualization/cloud computing infrastructure achieved in comparison to an non-virtualized equivalent system.

E-vigr applies real time power metering of the physical servers, comprising the virtual/cloud infrastructure, power consumption, a projected power consumption of virtualized servers, based on collected performance metrics and estimates in real time:

1. the instantaneous power consumption benefits of the virtualized infrastructure in comparison to a equivalent physical one,
2. the cumulative energy consumption benefits of the virtualized infrastructure over a selected time period,
3. an estimation of the monetary power savings based on public available energy cost figures,
4. an estimation of the cumulative CO2 emissions reduction over a selected time period based on public available figures,
5. total power savings are estimated using a variety of PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) factors, or if available based on the actual's measured platforms PUE.

E-vigr can calculate power consumption savings over XEN and VMWARE based virtual infrastructures, requiring the physical servers comprising the infrastructures to feature ILOM SNMP based power readings. It integrates nicely with Cacti for presentation purposes.

The e-vigr scripts while not overly complicated encapsulate a set of valid and appropriate assumptions in order to allow Datacenter and infrastructure managers to estimate and present power savings of virtualized and cloud infrastructures.

Due to the nature of virtualized infrastructures this set of scripts is open ended and is available as open source software in order to be customised to various platforms and installations. E-vigr is currently on its initial release (v0.5) and a lot of extra work is needed in order to make the scripts even more portable. Contributions are welcomed.

Examples

Evigr in action: real power consumption reductions estimation of the EKT/NHRF virtualization platform. Graphs created with Cacti with data produced by e-vigr

Energy savings are calculated from mid-2008 when the latest version of EKT's virtualised infrastructure began its operation.

Credits

E-vigr has been developed by staff of the Hellenic National Documentation Center (EKT/NHRF, http://www.ekt.gr). The development team includes:

• Panagiotis Stathopoulos,pstath at ekt.gr, EKT's Systems and Networks Unit supervisor
• Alexandros Soumplis, soumplis at ekt.gr, Senior Systems Administrator

E-vigr has beeing presented in the 2010 Hellenic Open Source Conference and builts on earlier work by EKT/NHRF on estimating in a static way the benefits of virtualised infrastructures. In "Experience and quantitative results from the deployment of an open source production-grade virtualization platform" and in "The case study of an F/OSS virtualization platform deployment and quantitative results" general benefits from the muigration of a legacy infrastructure to an open source virtualisation platform are discussed, with out the ability however to make real time measurements and estimations.