Have a look at Windows Server 2008 R2 default Power plan
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: