The massive development of the cloud marketplace is leading to an increase in the number of the Data Centers (DCs) globally and eventually to an increase of the CO 2 related footprint. The calculation of the impact of Virtual Machines (VMs) on the environment is a challenging task, not only due to the technical difficulties but also due to the lack of information from the energy providers. The ecological efficiency of a system captures the relationship between the performance of the system with its environmental footprint. In this paper we present a methodology for the estimation and prediction of the ecological efficiency of VMs in private cloud infrastructures. We specifically focus on the information management starting from the energy resources in a region, the energy consumption and the performance of the resources and finally the calculation of ecological efficiency of a VM. To this end, we have designed and implemented a framework through which the ecological efficiency of a running VM can be assessed and the ecological efficiency of a VM to be deployed can be forecasted. The presented framework is being evaluated through several private cloud scenarios with VM deployments in hosts located in Germany.
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