vSphere and HP Power Management modes

[chris sales]

Does anyone currently deploy their HP ESX hardware using dynamic power savings mode in the BIOS ? At the moment our hardware is running HP Static High Performance Mode - i would like to change it to DPS mode to see what sort of power reduction we see but first wanted to check to make sure there were no issues around vShhere and this power mode. Does anyone have any real life examples of power savings they have seen, or have any technical docs i can reference ?

Thanks in advance.

[Jan Soska]

Hello Chris,

we run 2x BL685 with dynamic mode and vSphere 4u1 with no problem.
We run another BL465g5 with the same mode and ESX 4iu1 - no problem as well.
To say true - we even did not try static performance mode - there is ~30 VMs and they run pretty well with no performance problems.

On the other hand - we haven't tested vSphere Power Management - to turn off one of ESX if is not needed. We plan to add another 2 ESX to cluster and then play with it.

Best Regards,

Jan

[Cara Michelle]

If you plan to take advantage of ESX 4's power managment in the future, then you will need to set the power management to "OS Control Mode." I haven't tested the other features in ESX 4 yet, but I have them enabled under the assumption that in "OS Control Mode" only ESX can initiate their use.