A number of VMware global partners, including Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and NEC, announced their support for use of VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM) to make their hardware more power efficient. VMware DPM, part of the VMware vSphere 4 platform, lowers power consumption in the data center by aggregating unused capacity and powering off unused servers without disrupting service levels.
VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM) is a component of VMware vSphere 4, which was introduced earlier this year. "What you are seeing now is broad industry support for the distributed power management capabilities within vSphere," Leena Joshi, product line manager, VMware, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Distributed Power Management takes a "very innovative approach to power management in the data center," optimizing power across groups of servers, says Joshi, who notes that various industry reports have shown that a server consumes up to almost 50% of its energy even when it is idle.
According to VMware, VMware DPM provides up to 20% 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.
"Distributed Power Management finds out the most optimal way to compress those virtual machines into the fewest number of servers possible and then powers off the unused servers so you are not wasting energy running those servers," notes Joshi. Then, as application loads increase at the beginning of the next working day, VMware DPM would power on servers and again redistribute the applications. In addition to using VMware DPM for cluster-wide power optimization, VMware vSphere 4 also supports energy-saving technologies from processor partners, such as AMD PowerNow and Intel SpeedStep, for additional power savings. To learn more about VMware DPM, go here.