A novel memory allocation scheme for memory energy reduction in virtualization environment

•Reducing memory's energy consumption based on virtual machine memory allocation.•Heuristic algorithms of allocating memory for virtual machines.•A dynamic memory management system for runtime environment.

Energy consumption is now a growing problem and leads to high costs in large data center based on virtualization technology. In data center, large memory consumes the main part of total energy, up to 41%. Observed from our experiments, we find that the dispersion characteristic of the virtual machine memory has a great impact on the overall energy consumption. This paper redesigns virtual machine's memory allocation scheme to reduce memory's energy consumption in virtual machine monitor. Two heuristic algorithms of allocating memory for virtual machines are proposed. Besides, based on the new memory allocations, we also design a dynamic memory management system for runtime environment. Experimental results show that our scheme achieves above 50% power reduction.