This article is a graphical, analytical survey of the literature, over the period 2010–2020, on the measurement of power consumption and relevant power models of virtual entities as they apply to the telco cloud. We present a novel review method, that summarizes the dynamics as well as the results of the research. Our method lends insight into trends, research gaps, fallacies and pitfalls. Notably, we identify limitations of the widely used linear models and the progression towards Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning techniques as a means of dealing with the seven major dimensions of variability: workload type; computer virtualization agents; system architecture and resources; concurrent, co-hosted virtualized entities; approaches towards the attribution of power consumption to virtual entities; frequency; and temperature.