There’s been some recent excitement circulating the internet around a VMware Virtual Infrastructure feature called Distributed Power Management (DPM). An impactful video demonstration of DPM was put together by VMware engineers two months ago and released on YouTube. I’m sure you’ve seen it already by now on the other blogs but I’ve provided a copy below in case you have not seen it.
DPM is currently in experimental status, however, Richard Garsthagen, a Senior Evangelist for VMware in EMEA (and a great conversationalist if you ever get the chance to have dinner with him), tells us in his blog that DPM “will be fully supported with the next release.” What exactly does next release mean? That’s a good question but we can safely assume one of two things: Update 4, or the next generation of Virtual Infrastructure which many, including myself, are unoffically calling VI4.
This is great news because DPM support is finally going to unlock additional potential for savings in the datacenter:
- Kilowatt consumption for powering the VI goes down
- Kilowatt consumption for cooling the VI goes down
- Consolidation of VMs offers increased opportunity for VMware Content Based Page Sharing resulting in more effective use of physical RAM and increased consolidation ratios
- Saving more of the environment means Green rating goes up (take a look at this great green calculator)
In the midst of all this excitement, we must not lose sight of the fact that a properly architected cluster should support a minimum of N+1 capacity. The goal should not be to simply shut down as many hosts as possible in the name of efficiency and saving the environment. This mindset will compromise uptime of VMs in the event of a host failure. Leave enough room in the cluster for HA to perform its responsibiity of powering on VMs on another available host.
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