Xen Project Developer Summit

Electricity charge for operating data centers is reaching approximately 27% of total operation cost. For this reason, ARM servers have been getting more attention for future energy-efficient data centers and the performance of ARM processors keeps increasing (i.e., almost 3GHz). For efficiently utilizing ARM cores, ARM PVH has been introduced in Xen 4.3, and based on this, we have implemented live migration feature and evaluated on top of dualcore ARM board. More specifically, we choose multimedia streaming workload, measure the maximum concurrent clients, and calculate clients per watt (CPW) as the performance metric. From this, we have found out that even dualcore ARM processor (with virtualization) gives higher CPW (7 CPW) over x86 case (6 CPW). In addition we could reduce the energy consumption around 70% (4-to-1 consolidation for low-loaded servers) by using server consolidation.