The Efficiency of the Virtustream μVM (MicroVM)

The Virtustream μVM is a fine-grained unit of measurement designed to fairly and accurately measure the actual consumption of cloud resources in xStream-powered clouds. Like the kilowatt hour (kWh) consumption metric that your home’s electric bill is based on, the μVM measures your actual consumption of compute, memory, network and storage resources. This is in direct contrast to the instance-hour billing scheme used by most cloud providers, which is based upon allocated rather than consumed resources.

To extend the electric utility analogy, cloud providers that charge by the instance-hour are like electric utilities that charge you based on the size of your house, not based on your power consumption. “But what about when I’m not home and leave the lights off? Or winters when I’m not running my A/C full bore?” Exactly! The instance-hour pricing scheme is a coarse measure of actual usage that primarily benefits the service provider, not the customer.

Due to its more accurate reflection of resource utilization within a given cloud environment, the μVM also aids in the design and management of xStream-powered clouds and makes possible a range of innovative features not practical with other cloud management tools. Just as

your power company uses kWh requirements at different times and locations to guide the deployment of new transformers and generators, so Virtustream and the xStream platform use the μVM to drive VM placement, sizing, scaling and overall cloud operations.

In order to continue IT’s successful role in enabling business growth, Lanx quickly realized that a cloud solution would give the organization the agility and elasticity it sought, along with other ancillary benefits such as low total cost of ownership (TCO) and infrastructure support. 

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