Green? Go Black and White with VMware

April 11th, 2010 |

Introduction

“Going Green” has been a buzz word in the IT community for years but the more I deal with this topic the more I consider it a black and white issue. I never thought I would be covering an energy blog topic, but there are some real world examples I wanted to write about. Datacenters are enormous consumers of energy from the IT infrastructure itself, all the way down to the HVAC that is needed to cool these power thirsty systems. While I think green initiatives are much needed in our industry, typically large corporations don’t consider these initiatives unless there is some intrinsic value associated with them i.e. money. Business drivers outweigh the political pressures of saving the environment, and in all fairness isn’t that what a company should be about, their own salvation?

Maybe that sounds harsh to all of the eco-friendly readers out there, but don’t get me wrong I am all about saving natural resources and respecting our environment. Understanding the underlying issue of the current state of our industry is critical if one is going to offer solutions to a problem. If corporations can save operational costs on power and cooling and say they are a “green company” then we have just killed those two birds with one stone.

Virtualization Cost Benefits

If you are new to VMware or virtualization in general, there are significant cost savings that are driven from implementing virtualization into your datacenter. Whatever the virtualization technology you decide to embrace, the act of collapsing many systems into few systems will result in less electricity consumed. If you would like to get an idea of how virtualization can impact your companies bottom line, stop over at the ROI calculator. This is a great tool that will allow you to plug in your own numbers to see real dollar amounts your organization can save. Let’s talk generalities and say you wanted to virtualize 75 physical servers in your datacenter, you could drop your power costs by $50k a year! That’s real money, and real results for your OPEX bottom line!

If you decide to go virtual, or maybe already have, contact your local utility company to see if they have any power incentives in your area. PG&E was the first leader in the utility space to have a program to give companies money back on their monthly bills for embracing virtualization. For a complete list of utility providers that participate in this program, click here.

Another Hidden Gem

I typically start tuning out on marketing hype (insert white noise) unless I can tie reality back to what is being discussed. One VMware feature that I have never looked at with much detail is Distributed Power Management. DPM is a technology that works in conjunction with DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) to monitor your VMware cluster resources and dynamically power up/down physical servers depending on the workload. Did you catch that? Automatically power your servers on and off depending upon the load? This means you can drive your energy savings down even more when implementing DPM in your VMware clusters.

You need to make sure you have a supported configuration before enabling DPM. Per the VMware vSphere resource management guide:

VMware DPM can use one of three power management protocols to bring a host out of standby mode: Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), Hewlett-Packard Integrated Lights-Out (iLO), or Wake-On-LAN (WOL).

Each protocol requires its own hardware support and configuration. If a host does not support any of these protocols it cannot be put into standby mode by VMware DPM. If a host supports multiple protocols, they are used in the following order: IPMI, iLO, WOL.

Make it Work

Below is a typical load of a standalone server, in this case we are looking at a DL385 G2. You can see on average it’s consuming about 250 Watts of power. This roughly breaks down to around $30.00 a month in electrical charges, or $360.00 a year.

Let’s say you are a small shop with only two ESX servers, the following is how you can help save costs for your company by utilizing DPM. Below is what a typical cluster looks like in a normal state:

Let’s enable DPM, right click on the cluster and go to properties. Beneath the VMware DRS section you will find a Power Management section. Select the radio button “Automatic” and adjust the DPM threshold to a level that works for your environment.

Below is a screen capture of what the cluster now looks like leveraging DPM. You can see the second ESX host no resides in standby mode and will automatically be powered on as the resources become more constrained in the cluster. Depending on your environment, you could potentially save energy costs during non-business hours when users sign-off and go home for the day.

Watch it in action

Here is a video that was put together before VMworld 2008 to drive this point home. Notice the ESX hosts come online as the load demand increases as users come into work, and then begins to decrease as the load diminishes. Good luck!