Virtual platform architectures for resource metering in datacenters

With cloud and utility computing models gaining significant momentum, data centers are increasingly employing virtualization and consolidation as a means to support a large number of disparate applications running simultaneously on a CMP server. In such environments, it is important to meter the usage of resources by each datacenter application so that customers can be charged accordingly. In this paper, we describe a simple metering and chargeback model (pay-as-you-go) and describe a solution based on virtual platform architectures (VPA) to accurately meter visible as well as transparent resources.