HP power management recommendation when running VMware

[chuckk281]

Mike was working with a customer in seting up VMware and the BL460c blades:

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Hello all,

My customer seeks a definitive recommendation for configuring ProLiant power management when running ESX 3.5 and vSphere 4.x. VMware has published a KB article recommending the ProLiant BIOS be configured for Maximum Performance or OS Control Mode. (If you read it, note how it is positioned as fixing a “poor” performance situation with HP servers vs. other brands.)

The customer wants their suppliers to publicly agree on such things. Unfortunately, I can’t find a similar document, either in white paper form or as a Customer Advisory. Anyone know where to find an HP recommendation on this topic? Public document availability notwithstanding, do we recommend the same settings as VMware?

The DPM implementation paper does not address the recommendations made by VMware. It makes no mention of ProLiant power regulator/power profile settings. It is a little surprising we don’t have a direct recommendation for those settings.

It is also interesting to note that we mirror the VMware recommendations when running the VMmark benchmark. The new (and outstanding!) DL580 G7 disclosure doc indicates the following BIOS settings:

• Turbo Boost Technology:              Enabled
• HP Power Regulator:                      HP Static High Performance Mode
• HP Power Profile:                            Maximum Performance

Should a customer infer an HP recommendation from our benchmark disclosure docs, absent any other document from HP?

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Andy joined in:

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We had a competitive situation in the last month where our BL460 G6 servers were falling down at about half the performance of the competitor. This was a HP customer where the competition was targeting the customers SAP application infrastructure currently hosted on Proliant. Notice how they targeted one of the customers systems, and not a generic server sale.

Long story short, the customer benchmark was rerun with the settings suggested by Mike below along with a few minor configuration changes to the blades, we handled the workload effortlessly.

Seems we ship a balance system architecture and the competition is tuned for an ESX environment. More likely they do not have any power control functionality or message.

Just anecdotal support for why we need what Mike is asking for.

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Comments? How is your system setup when running VMware?