Carbon Metering and Effective Tax Cost Modeling for Virtual Machines

With raising concerns about global warming and environmental impacts of Greenhouse Gases (GhGs) emissions, energy efficiency and carbon footprint reduction attracted many researchers to provide efficient models and tools for energy, carbon, and cost estimation and management. In this paper, a model for measuring the energy consumption and carbon footprint of an individual virtual machine is presented based on resource usage and performance monitoring counters. A simple cost model is represented in order to evaluate the energy consumption and carbon footprint models. The model evaluated on a simulated virtual private cloud with different methodologies such as server consolidation and multi-level grouping heuristic algorithms. The results show that such heuristic algorithms are able to significantly reduce the cost of energy and carbon footprint of an individual virtual machine in comparison with other methodologies such as server consolidation. The results also show that this cost reduction efficiency is positively correlated to the increase in carbon footprint tax rates.