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I'm working on coordinating a rack with 1 HP Proliant DL580 G5 and 2 Proliant DL380 G4's. Is it possible to induce either of these units into something like a standby mode?

I've perused the manuals for these systems, and have so far found nothing. Each of these things chews up an obscene amount of power, since they contain a total of 40 Xeons between them, and they take several minutes each to start up. These servers don't need to run constantly, but they need to be available for computation at essentially any time- is there any solution available to reduce their power consumption, without incurring more than about a minute of delay?

In case it's relevant, the DL580 is set up with Ubuntu server, the DL380's with ESXi - both of those can be changed if necessary, however.

mdpc
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deftfyodor
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3 Answers3

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So, you're using an HP ProLiant server, are you by chance also using iLO (Integrated Lights-Out)?

If so, it's possible to integrate VMware's Distributed Power Management (DPM) feature with iLO on at least the ESXi host you have there, as long as you're using vCenter Server. I found the support doc for VMware vSphere 5.5 (I don't know which version you're using) here and you can access a whitepaper from HP on deploying VMware Distributed Power Management here.

iLO alone may actually be enough to address your issue on both boxes, but the integration with VMware seemed worth mentioning since you're running at least one ESXi host.

Kate
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The DL380 G4's do not have the P-State capabilities for this (ILO1). The DL580 G5 does (ILO2).

If possible, you should not even bother using the DL380 G4's, as they're 10 years-old and have been eclipsed by five product lines since they were active products.

VMware vSphere can do this automatically, but if you're running ESXi on the G4's, it's likely a version too old to support that feature set.

Community
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ewwhite
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The use of the word "standby" may not have been used in general since and not a technical one. Both of these units support the ACPI S4 sleep state. As @Kate suggested, you may want to look at DPM and determine what support for ACPI-S4 you can coax out of the documents.

Dan
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