Power consumption is an important part of the datacenter cost strategy. Physical servers frequently offer a power management scheme that puts processors into low power states when not fully utilized, and VMware vSphere also offers power management techniques. A recent technical white paper describes the testing and results of two performance studies: The first shows how power management in VMware vSphere 5.5 in balanced mode (the default) performs 18% better than the physical host’s balanced mode power management setting. The second study compares vSphere 5.1 performance and power savings in two server models that have different generations of processors. Results show the newer servers have 120% greater performance and 24% improved energy efficiency over the previous generation.
For more information, please read the paper: Power Management and Performance in VMware vSphere 5.1 and 5.5.