HPE Power Profile Modes explained and best practice for HPE Server

 Today I discoverd a VM that was running slower on one host than on the other.
This was due to Power Profiles misconfigured. Having them set to “Balanced Power and Performance” lead to only C-States are exposed to the Hypervisior and thus leading to lower control over CPU clock speeds.

The bad thing about this is that there is no default option for this but you have to select the Custom Profile and have Power Regulator set to “OS Control Mode”. This will expose P- States to the hypervisor.

The cool thing about it, it´s also available via iLO at least on Gen9 and Gen10 but you have to reboot anyway for changes to take effect.

Having now both ACPI states available to the hypervisor gives you now the option to either select High Performance that will limit the ability to leverage turbo boost but having consistent performance or even better selecting “Balanced Performance” that will unlock turbo bin´s but more about this is perfectly written down here starting on page 170

http://pages.rubrik.com/rs/794-OHF-673/images/vSphere_6.5_Host_Resources_Deep_Dive.pdf

There is a VMware KB 1018206 about this as well https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1018206

To find Hosts that only expose either of both ACPI technlologies you can use that PowerCLI

Select Name,
    @{N='Technology';E={$_.ExtensionData.Hardware.CpuPowerManagementInfo.HardwareSupport}},
    @{N='CurrentPolicy';E={$_.ExtensionData.Hardware.CpuPowerManagementInfo.CurrentPolicy}} |
? {$_.Technology -notlike "ACPI P-states, ACPI C-states" -and $_.Technology -notlike ""} 

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