Datacenters & Green IT

ProxCenter can model the physical datacenters that host your Proxmox infrastructure and use that context to calculate energy, cost, and CO2 estimates for VMs and vDCs.

This is useful for MSPs and platform teams that operate infrastructure across multiple sites with different power costs, PUE values, and carbon intensity.

Green IT settings define the datacenter factors used for energy, cost, CO2, and Green Score calculations.

Datacenter Configuration

Each datacenter profile can define:

Field	Description
Name	Human-readable datacenter or site name
Location	City, region, or internal site identifier
PUE	Power Usage Effectiveness used to estimate facility overhead
Electricity price	Local energy price used for cost estimates
CO2 factor	Emissions factor used for carbon estimates
Server specs	Hardware characteristics used to improve energy estimation

After creating a datacenter, assign clusters, nodes, or vDCs to it. Green metrics are calculated from the datacenter where the workload actually runs instead of using a global default.

Assignment Levels

Assignments can be made at multiple levels:

• Cluster -- Applies the datacenter profile to every node in the cluster unless overridden.
• Node -- Overrides the cluster assignment for a specific physical host.
• vDC -- Provides tenant-facing placement context and reporting boundaries.

Use node-level assignment when a cluster spans physical sites or when different hosts have materially different power characteristics.

VM Green Score

The Inventory page shows a per-VM Green Score in the VM header. It summarizes the last 30 days of estimated:

• Energy consumption
• Electricity cost
• CO2 emissions
• Efficiency score and score deltas

Hovering the score opens a breakdown with CPU average, datacenter PUE, and one actionable insight. Examples include idle CPU, oversized RAM, mostly stopped workload, or placement in an efficient datacenter.

Tenant and vDC Metrics

Tenant users see Green IT KPIs in My vDC for their assigned environment. Provider administrators can compare tenants, vDCs, clusters, and datacenters from the provider view and include this data in reports.

Green IT metrics follow the same tenant isolation model as inventory and backups: tenants only see their own vDC, while provider administrators can aggregate across tenants.

Reports

Reports can include datacenter and Green IT sections for:

• Capacity and consumption over the selected period
• Estimated energy cost
• Estimated CO2 emissions
• Per-vDC or per-tenant breakdowns
• Placement recommendations based on datacenter efficiency

info

Green IT metrics are operational estimates based on configured datacenter factors and observed workload behavior. They are intended for capacity planning, customer reporting, and optimization, not as a certified utility meter.