The Effects of HP's Power Profile on vCPU Performance

Citrix/Terminal Services/Remote Desktop Services, Hardware, Performance/Sizing, Virtualization & Containers
Published May 28, 2013

When you buy a new HP server it comes with the BIOS setting HP Power Profile set to Balanced Power and Performance. That sounds good but is bad - at least for CPU performance in a VDI environment.

When we prepared our servers for use as virtualization hosts for Citrix XenDesktop we took great care to configure the HP Power Profile for Maximum Performance:

That fixed the problems with really awful CPU performance we had in the beginning. But still - some VMs were performing worse than others. When I looked at the problem I soon found a VM with bad CPU performance. I ran some benchmarks, comparing it to a “good” VM:

Test setup:
CPU: Xeon E5-2670 2.6 GHz
Hypervisor: VMware ESXi 5.0 Update 1
VM OS: Windows 7 64 Bit
VM configuration: 2 vCPUs

Benchmark	Good VM	Bad VM
Cinebench 11.5 CPU » more is better	2.20	1.48
NovaBench CPU Test » more is better	262	204
Super Pi 1M [s] « less is better	13.2	32.2

Depending on the benchmark, the “good” VM is between 28% and 244% faster than the “bad” VM. That is a lot!

I suspected the power profile setting of the server hosting the “bad” VM to be wrong, but how to check without rebooting the server and accessing the BIOS? These are production systems and we cannot use vMotion to move the VMs off the server because the VMs are on local storage. Luckily the power profile setting is not only available from the BIOS, but from the iLO console, too. It can even be changed from iLO, taking effect immediately:

iLO Power Settings

Sure enough, the “bad” VM was on a server with incorrectly configured power profile. Switching it to HP Static High Performance Mode fixed the issue. Strangely, the settings are named differently in BIOS and iLO.

If you want to know more about power profiles and power regulator: HP has a whitepaper on the topic.

Citrix VCPU VMware XenDesktop

Comments

Comments are powered by Giscus. Please enable JavaScript to view them, or view discussions directly on GitHub.

Related Posts

Batch Delete Issued Citrix User/Device Licenses with Udadmin

Udamin.exe is a handy tool for managing Citrix user/device licenses. To get a list of currently issued licenses run it like this: C:\Program Files\Citrix\Licensing\LS>udadmin.exe -list Usage data is 15 minutes old. Next update in 1 minutes. Users: username1 XDT_PLT_UD 2013.0815 username2 XDT_PLT_UD 2013.0815 Devices: computername1 XDT_PLT_UD 2013.0815 computername2 XDT_PLT_UD 2013.0815 You can delete individual license assignments like this:

Citrix/Terminal Services/Remote Desktop Services

XenApp and RDS Sizing Part 3 – Determining Farm Load

XenApp and RDS Sizing Part 3 – Determining Farm Load

This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. In the previous part of this series we saw how to determine the capacity of a server farm. This time we will look at how that capacity is utilized, in other words at farm load. As before we will do that for the four main components of a XenApp server separately: CPU, memory, storage and network.

Citrix/Terminal Services/Remote Desktop Services

How-to: XenApp/RDS Sizing and Capacity Planning with uberAgent for Splunk

How-to: XenApp/RDS Sizing and Capacity Planning with uberAgent for Splunk

Do you know the maximum number of users each of your terminal servers can host with acceptable performance? You may have found out the hard way how many are too many - but how many are just right? Farm sizing and server capacity planning are typical tasks for consultants who often have a hard time fighting the peculiarities of perfmon and logman trying to get the data they need for their calculations. It can be so much easier at no additional cost. The 60-day Enterprise Trial version of Splunk in conjunction with an evaluation license of uberAgent give all the information you need in much less time. Here is how.

Citrix/Terminal Services/Remote Desktop Services

Script: Gracefully Shut Down all VMs on a Given Set of Hosts (VMware/XenDesktop)

Cleanly shutting down all virtual machines on a given set of hosts is not as trivial as it might seem - especially if you want to be able to restore the original state once the planned maintenance you are doing this for is completed.

Citrix/Terminal Services/Remote Desktop Services

Latest Posts

Changing the Location of PowerShell Profile Scripts

A PowerShell profile is an init script that is executed when the shell starts. PowerShell searches for profile scripts in hard-coded locations. This article explains how to move profile scripts to any directory of your choice.

Changing the Location of the Windows Terminal Settings Files

Changing the Location of the Windows Terminal Settings Files

Windows Terminal stores its settings in configuration files that resides in the Windows user profile. This article explains how to move them to any directory of your choice. Where are the Settings Files Located? The location of the Windows Terminal settings file is hard-coded. The exact path depends on the app variant you installed, but it’s always in the user profile:

Fast & Silent 5 Watt PC: Minimizing Idle Power Usage

Fast & Silent 5 Watt PC: Minimizing Idle Power Usage

This micro-series explains how to turn the Lenovo ThinkCentre M90t Gen 6 into a smart workstation that consumes only 5 Watts when idle but reaches top Cinebench scores while staying almost imperceptibly silent. In the first post, I showed how to silence the machine by replacing and adding to Lenovo’s CPU cooler. In this second post, I’m listing the exact configuration that achieves the lofty goal of combining minimal idle power consumption with top Cinebench scores.

Fast & Silent 5 Watt PC: Lenovo ThinkCentre M90t Modding

Fast & Silent 5 Watt PC: Lenovo ThinkCentre M90t Modding

This micro-series explains how to turn the Lenovo ThinkCentre M90t Gen 6 into a smart workstation that consumes only 5 Watts when idle but reaches top Cinebench scores while staying almost imperceptibly silent. In this first post, I’m showing how to silence the machine by replacing and adding to Lenovo’s CPU cooler. In a second post, I’m listing the exact configuration that achieves the lofty goal of combining minimal idle power consumption with top Cinebench scores.