Static High Performance Mode

[chuckk281]

Joe had a question about CPU power modes:

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The customer is asking whether turning off “Static High Performance mode” to our ESX platforms hosting their virtual machines with AMD processors is better for best performance?

Can someone please confirm which is the better option for best performance for Physical and Virtual servers?

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Reply from Eirik:

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I know there was an advisory regarding keeping it on on Intel servers atleast if you are running virtualization, due to some issues with cores sleeping in balanced and powersaving mode.

I can’t imagine the performance going _up_ when turning _off_ the static high performance mode, if that was the case the mode should rather have been called “power consuming mode which gives no performance advantage”, but it might just be me who expects a mode name to define what that mode actually does.

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And good input from Mark:

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Depends what the customer is looking for.  Are they after max performance, max power savings, or something more balanced?

A good option is to use one of the RBSU power profiles that tune numerous settings with a single setting:

Power profiles

In the ProLiant 300-series G6 and G7 RBSU, the HP Power Profile defines three possible configurations of some of the power features identified earlier in this section. The HP Power Profile provides a simple mechanism for users to configure the power management options of their system based on their tolerance to power versus performance without having to individually configure each option.

There are three possible settings for the HP Power Profile: Maximum Performance; Balanced Power and Performance; and Minimum Power Usage. An additional ―Custom‖ setting is simply any combination of user settings that do not match the pre-sets for the three categories listed in Table 3.

Table 3. Power Profile settings Power Saving Feature	Maximum Performance	Balanced Power & Performance	Minimum Power Usage
Power Regulator	Static High	Dynamic	Static low
Manage QPI power	Off	On	On
Memory Interleave	Full interleave	Full interleave	Disabled
PCIe 2.0	Enabled	Enabled	Off
Memory Speed	Auto	Auto	800 MHz
Minimum processor idle power	No C-states	C6	C6

As Eirik mentions, there are issues with ESX that you can read about here:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01732803/c01732803.pdf

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What do you do for virtualization?