For the release of its vSphere 4.0 platform (formerly VMware Infrastructure), VMware will drop the label “experimental” from one of the most interesting features released with VI3.5: Distributed Power Management (DPM).
It’s not yet clear how much DPM will impact the data center operations today, but CPU power management certainly is a feature that is influencing the roadmaps of several vendors:
- Intel will release a Dynamic Power Node Manager with its upcoming Nehalem CPU
- Microsoft will release Core Parking and CPU power consumption controls as part of Windows Server 2008 R2 which Hyper-V 2.0 will leverage
At today, Virtual Iron is the only vendor that officially supports power management capabilities: their implementation is called LivePower, available since August 2008 in Virtual Iron 4.4.
Citrix may be playing catch-up as well.
A recent post on the corporate blogs reveals that the company has worked on an unofficial project called PowerSmart for XenApp (at that time Presentation Server).
The project was halted and it’s now morphing into something official.
As XenApp and XenServer are deeply connected now and Xen continues to develop power management capabilities, maybe the next version of XenServer may feature something like DPM soon.