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Have a look at Windows Server 2008 R2 default Power plan

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Hi

My basement allows me to run a mini digital plant at home. (Smile).

Even if electrical power is pretty cheap in Quebec province (thanks to hydraulic electrical plants), you may want to have a look at the power plan your servers currently run: it may either over consuming power for nothing, or have not enough power to deliver…

That’s extreme ends, but you may want to have a look. To do that run: 

gwmi win32_powerplan -namespace root\cimv2\power | ft -Property ElementName, IsActive -Autosize

 

You will see the default power plan for a Windows Server 2008 R2 is: "Balanced"

What does it mean?

It means you don't get by default all the Computing power you can expect from your Windows Server ….

 

That may be a problem if you hit performances degradations, or expect more from your computing pools. The most tangible impact would be on both Hyper-V servers and SQL Servers you have (for your SharePoint farms in our case).

On the other hand, you can change it dynamically with a (Remote?) PowerShell command.

You can even orchestrate this setting with System Center 2012 (I'll cover that in future posts), monitoring the CPU and disk demand (with SC OM), to trigger a power plan change (with Orchestrator)

To change the Power Plan to High Performance (or any other one available), you may use these 2 commands:

$HighPerfPowerPlan = gwmi win32_powerplan -namespace root\cimv2\power -computername localhost -filter "elementname='High performance'" ;

$HighPerfPowerPlan.Activate()

And here you go …. The gain can be between 10 and 25% in performances (for High Performance, especially if this machine is a SQL Server physical box).

Note the -ComputerName parameter, and have a look at Get-WmiObject cmdlet…. You'll see you can easily apply this to a bunch of servers with one command line (or ps1 script).

 

Or through GPOs: I just realized Microsoft uses this internally to enforce a Power Plan on corporate Laptops and workstations. Funny isn’t it?

 

-Emmanuel

 Inspired from these 2 sources:

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    February 13, 2012
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    September 12, 2012
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