Virtual machine power consumption measurement and management

A method implemented on a computing device for individually controlling power consumption of a plurality of virtual machines residing on a physical host server, comprising:

• using the computing device to perform the following:
• monitoring a power consumption of each virtual machine on the host server;
• measuring a peak power drawn by each virtual machine on the host server;
• determining whether any of the plurality of virtual machines has exceeded its power budget;
• if so, then determining whether a power budget of the host server has been exceeded;
• and
• if so, then reducing a power consumption of at least one of the virtual machines to reduced a total power consumption of the host server.

A computing system comprising:

• one or more hardware resources including a processing unit;
• and
• computer readable instructions that, when executed by the processing unit, cause the processing unit to:
• perform a power meter measurement of power consumption on the computing system, the power meter measurement reflecting power consumed by the one or more hardware resources;
• based on the power meter measurement, determine power consumption measurements of multiple virtual machines that execute on the computing system;
• and
• reduce power consumption of the computing system by throttling less than all of the multiple virtual machines.