Energy Estimation for Virtual Servers Using Resource Utilization and Machine Learning

Abstract

Estimating the energy use of virtual servers is difficult because physical power interfaces and privileged host counters are typically accessible only on the underlying physical host. We investigate a machine learning approach that predicts the CPU-package power attributable to an individual virtual server from system and performance metrics observable within that virtual server itself. During training, host-side RAPL measurements provide the power target used to learn this mapping, while deployed inference requires only measurements available within the virtual server. We evaluate the approach across heterogeneous CPU platforms, multiple workload families, unseen workloads and hardware, concurrent workload combinations, and varying resource allocations using temporally blocked evaluation. Prediction is generally strong when deployment conditions are represented during training, while zero-shot transfer to unseen workloads, hardware, and configurations is less reliable. A pooled multi-platform model retains good performance when target platforms are represented during training, and pooled multi-configuration modeling performs well across different processor and memory allocations. Feature-importance analysis reveals interpretable resource signatures consistent with workload behavior across CPU, memory, storage, and network activity. Monitoring and inference add little direct CPU-power overhead. The results support practical virtual server power estimation when training data cover the intended deployment domain.