As part of routine checks of the environment some rather unusual results were seen in the DRS Resource Distribution chart. The chart was suggesting that the full performance wasn’t being delivered to the VMs. It was thought that this was probably an issue at the host level and a colleague suggested checking the power settings on the host.

 

The standard for the current environment is to set the Power Regulator settings to “HP Static High Performance Mode” to ensure maximum performance of the hosts and VMs. Perhaps this host hadn’t been configured right? We should be seeing the following via iLO.

 

As suspected, the host was set to Dynamic. When this was changed to High, the DRS Resource Distribution reverted to the more normal all green.

I then wanted to check through other hosts but wanted to look for a way of scripting a query, rather than using the web interface. HP Scripting Tools for Windows Powershell to the rescue.

Head over to their page to download the module for iLO and OA and install. Querying is straight forward, here are a few to get you started

See all cmdlets in the HPiLOCmdlets

get-command -Module HPiLOCmdlets

Bringing up the Command Addon in the ISE is also a useful way of browsing all the cmdlets available per module

 

Get help on a cmdlet

get-help Get-HPiLOAssetTag

Get the Power Regulator Settings

Find-HPiLO “192.168.10.159-162” | Get-HPiLOHostPowerSaver -username XXXX

Get the firmware version

Find-HPiLO “192.168.10.159-162” | Get-HPiLOFirmwareVersion -username XXXX

Get the Enclosure and location

Find-HPiLO “192.168.10.159-162” | Get-HPiLOOAInfo -username XXXX | select ip, hostname, encl, location, rack | ft -AutoSize

VMware have a knowledge base article covering this scenario. VMware KB: Poor virtual machine application performance may be caused by processor power management settings (1018206)