VMware’s global partners, including Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM
and NEC have recently announced their support for using its
Distributed Power Management (DPM) solution to increase power
efficiency on their hardware. The DPM solution which is a part of
VMware’s vSphere 4 platform promises to lowers power
consumption in the datacenter by aggregating unused capacity and
powering off unused servers without disrupting service levels.
“We saw an opportunity to save even more power for our
customers by focusing on partially used servers in virtualized
environments,” said Dr. Stephen Herrod, chief technology
officer and senior vice president of R&D at VMware.
Dr. Herrod explains that DPM essentially performs server
defragmentation. It determines the best way to consolidate
workloads on to the fewest number of physical servers needed to
meet the applications’ performance requirements. The solution
then powers off unneeded servers to reduce datacenter energy
consumption, powering them back on when the performance needs
require more physical resources. This is done automatically,
without disruption, while ensuring application SLAs are
satisfied.
“Combined with energy-efficient hardware from our server
partners, customers have an opportunity to save costs and make a
positive impact in their carbon footprints,” adds Dr.
Herrod.
The solution promises up to 20 percent additional reduction in
energy usage on top of what is possible with consolidation by
automatically placing all virtual machines on the fewest number of
physical servers and powering down the physical servers that are
not necessary to guarantee service levels to applications.
A typical use case would be powering down physical servers at
night or on weekends when the application loads decrease; as
application loads increase at the beginning of the working day, DPM
would power on servers and again redistribute the applications.
In addition to using DPM for cluster-wide power optimization,
vSphere 4 also supports energy-saving technologies from processor
partners such as AMD PowerNow and Intel SpeedStep, for additional
power savings.