It is quite normal for anyone wanting to extract as much as
they can from a hardware that they have bought. Make optimal use of it. When
you are looking at Esxi hosts you are looking at a certified hardware which has
been tested and tasted by experts at VMware and the vendor. If you have put
some thousands or crores of money into your hardware, then you might well make
the best use of it. If you are a biological being, then you want to live longer
but if you are hardware then you want to do the best before you become
obsolete.
VMware itself supports 3 types of performance or power
modes.
1.
High Performance
2.
Balanced
3.
Low power
I myself would put my hosts in high performance mode but your
scenarios might differ. I mean does it make sense to put your bike always on
high throttle or wheelie mode (if you have any of the newer street bikes with
different riding modes coz I don’t) in a city traffic? No. Below is a glimpse of
where you can do it via GUI.
I would however want to do this via Powercli where you can
get this done to all your esxi hosts at once. High performance mode as the name suggests, the operating system
assumes that your workload’s requirement of resources keeps changing
drastically and it always needs the resources to be ready. It does however
comes at the cost of more power consumption. The main goal here is the
performance and power consumption is of no concern to the esxi host.
Balanced as the
name itself suggests will maintain a balance between the power consumption and
the performance. Here esxi will still give priority to the performance but not
at the cost of too much power consumption.
Low Power is the
most energy saving mode where esxi will prioritize on power saving against
performance. This can be used for failover hosts in a cluster if your HA
settings are such that you have reserved hosts for failover.
Combine this with the BIOS settings of your esxi hosts and
you will have some amazing performance for your hosts.
I would suggest the following for your environment if you
are wondering what is the right one for your environment. I suggest 2 ways of
deciding it.
Method 1: Flactuation
You can approximately consider the following values per day
or week.
Lowerst % of resource Usage
|
Highest % of Resource Usage
|
Flactuation [H-L]
|
Performance Setting
|
L
|
H
|
30 - 40
|
High Performance
|
L
|
H
|
20 - 30
|
Balanced
|
L
|
H
|
20 - 10
|
Low Power
|
Method 2: Maximum Resource Usage
-+70% to -+90% Ã
High performance
-+50% to -+70% Ã
Balanced
50% or less à Low Power
Here -+ stands for plus or minus, meaning an approximation
or round figure.
This will set the performance of your esxi hosts to High
Performance.
(Get-View
(Get-VMHost
| Get-View).ConfigManager.PowerSystem).ConfigurePowerPolicy(1)
Please note that here
1. High
performance
2. Balanced
3. LowPower
You would however may not remember the above 3 options
against their numbers. So it might be better to do a write-host for this
function where it will inform about it and asks you to choose.
Write-Host "choose a number from below
1. High performance
2. Balanced
3. LowPower
" -BackgroundColor White
-ForegroundColor Black
And take the user input after this with
$option = Read-Host "?"
It is also annoying that this won’t tell you the real
progress or won’t tell you currently on which host is it running. That is why
we might want to create a loop for each host and display the name of the host
before it runs.
foreach ($vmhost in (get-cluster
$cluster |
get-vmhost |
sort))
{$vmhost.Name
(Get-View
(Get-VMHost
$vmhost |
Get-View).ConfigManager.PowerSystem).ConfigurePowerPolicy($option)
}
This is how it will
look at the end with some timers built in the script to tell you how much it
took for you to run this script.
$cluster = Read-Host "name
of the cluster[type * to include all clusters]?"
Write-Host "choose a number from below
1. High performance
2. Balanced
3. LowPower
" -BackgroundColor White
-ForegroundColor Black
$option = Read-Host "?"
$stopWatch = [system.diagnostics.stopwatch]::startNew()
$stopWatch.Start()
foreach ($vmhost in (get-cluster
$cluster |
get-vmhost |
sort))
{$vmhost.Name
(Get-View
(Get-VMHost
$vmhost |
Get-View).ConfigManager.PowerSystem).ConfigurePowerPolicy($option)
}
$stopWatch.Stop()
Write-Host "Elapsed Runtime:" $stopWatch.Elapsed.Hours "Hours"
$stopWatch.Elapsed.Minutes "minutes
and" $stopWatch.Elapsed.Seconds "seconds." -BackgroundColor White -ForegroundColor Black
Obviously you have noticed that I have left out the custom
option. Well that is for you to discover and I am sure it will be worth your
time.
