There’s a glut of Operations Manager 2007 management packs available from Microsoft. One of them really stood out. It is the Windows Power Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.
The short description is:
“The Power Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 R2 enables you to monitor and manage the power consumption of computers running Windows Server 2008 R2.
This management pack provides:
- Visibility into power consumption
- Visibility and control of power policy
- Ability to lower power consumption during non-business hours to reduce overall power consumption
- Ability to limit power consumption
- Ability to detect excessive power consumption”
Microsoft is making a lot of effort in this space. System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3 could be considered as “System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Power Management Edition”. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 both include lots of power features.
This new management pack seems to be leveraging some of those features in Windows Server 2008 R2. The basic concept is that it will retrieve details of power consumption for servers running that operating system. It allows you to set power plans and use automatic recovery to switch power plans based on server usage. You can set thresholds and raise alerts when servers consume more than an allocated amount of power. You can force servers to use no more than a certain amount of power.
This is a complicated management pack. There is a Word document with rough instructions. Please read it thoroughly before importing this management pack. If you have a physical lab (the management pack won’t do anything with VM’s) then work with it there first. You should also note that if you use SQL 2008 for your OpsMgr database then you should apply a hotfix first.