Research Of Memory Energy Saving Mechanism In Virtualization Environment

Virtualization technology which provides server consolidation and security isolationhas already been used widely in large data center currently. With the use of large-capacitymemory, main memory in virtualization environment has become a major energy producerin data center. Current memory energy saving technology in virtualization environmentdoes not consider the impact of the distribution of virtual machine’s memory, resultingpoor energy-saving effect. Current memory chip consists of lots of controllableunits(Rank), each Rank contains different power state. During the runtime of virtual ma-chine, its memory is distributed into many different Ranks which greatly increasing totalmemory energy consumption.A new memory allocation system based on reducing memory energy is proposed inthis paper to solve the problem. The system tries to reduce memory energy consumptionfrom the point view of memory allocation. The system consists of two main mechanisms.One is to redesign a new method to manage memory pages in VMM in a more simple andefficient way, thus facilitating upper memory operations. The other is to design some heu-ristic memory allocation algorithm for virtual machine’s memory and VMM heap memorybased on the new memory organization method. The algorithms try to allocate physicalmemory into as few Ranks as possible in order to make more Ranks in power-saving state,so that more energy reduction is achieved.The experiments show that compared to the original system, the improved memoryallocation system achieves nearly50percentages power reduction while in dynamic envi-ronment, our system achieves over60percentages power reduction. The results show thatthe improved memory allocation system greatly reduces the energy consumption of phys-ical memory in virtualization environment.