ESXI 5.5 Power Management?

[abstractalgebra]

My idle power seams high at ~80 watts with only ESXI 5.5 All-in-one OmniOS/Nappit appliance. All VMs and vCenter powered off ~79 Watts. ESXI Power Management: Balanced vs. low power does not seam to matter. ~140 Watts under load (trans coding).

Any tricks I can use to lower the idle power for this home server?

X10SLM+-F, Xeon 1240v3, 32GB ECC, Dell H200/SAS2008-IT Pass-through, Mellanox ConnextX-2 EN
6 x 3TB WD RED Raid-Z2: NFS for ESXI + SMB NAS
64GB SSD Imation: vCenter/Napp-it Appliance
120GB Kingston V300 L2ARC

 

[33_viper_33]

not really. your mainboard and chip will draw approximately 20w at idle, each drive approximately 6w at idle for another 36 watts, the ib card at least 10w, and the SSD approximately another watt at idle. Grand total of very conservative estimate is 66 watts. Do your drives have spindown enabled. If not, there is more power which puts you right in the range of 80 watts.

I'm envious by the way. My old core 2 quad with IB, areca raid and 9 1.5 tb drives idles around 200 watts...

 

[abstractalgebra]

Thank you that helped and I think I figured it out.

I had to close the vSphere client and ensure all VMs on the NFS store were also closed. Then it powers down to ~63 watts.
I'm planning for an SSDs so my frequent VMs don't keep all of the Spinning drives from going into low power mode.

 

[Diavuno]

ya, my servers draw ~225 watts at idle give or take 25 depending

 

[ZeroOne]

Just throwing this out there, since we have similar chips (1245v3 here)... I see a 20 watt from-the-wall improvement in running win8 directly vs. esxi 5.5 and a win8vm.

It doesn't appear to let the haswell version clock down as much as native windows drivers. CPU temp is also 10 degrees lower when idling in native win8 vs. esxi 5.5 / win8vm.

Edit to add: also using "balanced" power in both ESXi, win8vm, and the native windows install.

 

[RyC]

I've got the 1245v3 as well and I can corroborate those numbers. Also running ESXi in "Balanced" mode

 

[ZeroOne]

Are any of you also having an issue shutting down the host with similar hardware configuration? (1245v3 and P9D-E/4L)

Will not shut down entirely. Powering off eventually results in lack of ping to host IP but the power to the system stays on.

Display still shows inactive black/white ESXi screen, but it appears locked. Can't press any key to turn yellow. Also, when viewing the CPU temp in the board management, the CPU shoots up to 50C from a usual 25-30C at the time of shutdown / ping timeout.