Policies

You can use policies to limit the amount of power that an entity consumes. Each policy applies to either a group entity in the hierarchy or a device.

Energy Manager provides several policy types:

• ‘Custom Power Limit’ limits the total power consumption of an entity. When the policy applies to a group entity in the hierarchy, Energy Manager actively reallocates the power budgets to the individual servers within the group in each monitoring cycle. It attempts to minimize the gap between the power demands of each entity and the overall power allocation for the group, in order to minimize the performance impact of the group power capping. Energy Manager monitors the power consumption data of the servers, estimates the power demand of the servers, and reallocates the power budgets with a sophisticated approach by applying a heuristic discriminative approach to solve a probabilistic model. In general, Energy Manager reacts quickly by allocating more power to servers to get new tasks running properly. If the total power demand of the group exceeds the group power constraint, Energy Manager implements a balanced power allocation. The policies are commonly applied to increase the server density with respect to power or cooling capacity.

• ‘Minimum Power’ throttles power consumption of an entity as much as possible. Use this policy to prolong business continuity in the case of an emergency. The Minimum Power would set the frequency of CPUs to the lowest level, and then it may impact your server performance.

You can go to the ‘Policies’ page or to the ‘Policies’ tab on the ‘Datacenter Management’ page to view the policies.