Nice video of a day in the life of some VI servers using DRS with DPM (distributed power management) enabled. As the workforce comes into the office, utilization increases, ESX servers come out of standby mode, VMs get VMotioned, and everybody’s happy. The process reverses itself after 5pm. (Who leaves work at 5pm?) And the servers happily sleep overnight or until you need them again. And the sys admins? Feet up, watching YouTube, never touching a power switch or a mouse. It’s all automatic.
From instigator Scott Drummonds: VMware Communities: Virtual Performance: DPM Power/Performance Video.
We started the test with 13 tiles worth of VMs (108 VMs in all) on the
DRS cluster. With all of these VMs idle, DPM consolidated them to a
single host and turned off three servers. As the load was applied to
the VMs at 9:00 AM and driven through an eight-hour workday, DRS and
DPM powered on servers and balanced load, as needed. When the day ended
at 5:00 PM, the load was again consolidated and servers were powered
down. The video we shot includes power meters of the systems under test
and screenshots of activity induced by DRS and DPM.
