Baldwin Ng

Contents

An Overview of Where you can Save
Planning for Greener IT
Configuring Power Settings
MAP Reporting for Desktops
MAP Reporting for Servers
Data Center Virtualization
Next Steps

Corporations are increasingly realizing their responsibility to environmental sustainability and looking for ways to build more sustainable desktop and server infrastructures, as well as seeking ways to lessen the environmental impact of their businesses. This gives you a great opportunity to to take on a key role in helping your organization go green.

IT departments typically create vast amounts of carbon waste and fail to effectively manage power consumption. Improvements in IT can both help the environment and save your company money.

But where do you start? What's the first step to helping the environment and the bottom-line? How can you turn your company into a socially responsible organization and yourself into a cost-savings hero?

You can start by looking at server virtualization and implementing a power management strategy for your desktops and servers. Combined, these two technologies can result in dramatic energy savings throughout your entire organization. This leads to a lower TCO (total cost of ownership) for your infrastructure and a reduced carbon footprint for the organization.

An Overview of Where you can Save

There are a number of places you can easily target to reduce energy consumption and cut costs. From simple things like managing power settings to strategies such as consolidating servers.

Server consolidation using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtualization technology can substantially reduce the amount of power and cooling needed for data center operation. When you consolidate underutilized servers with Hyper-V, fewer physical servers are needed, minimizing the unnecessary hardware requirements and power and cooling demands that result from wasteful server sprawl.

Windows Vista enables administrators to use Group Policy for configuring and enforcing power settings throughout the entire organization. Power savings from such features as display and system sleep settings multiplied throughout the organization can lead to significant reductions in energy consumption.

Additional reductions in energy consumption can be achieved by upgrading old hardware. And even upgrading your OS can help—tests have shown Windows Server 2008 to require as much as 10 percent less energy over Windows Server 2003 for a comparable workload.

Planning for Greener IT

With Hyper-V virtualization, Windows Vista power management, and Windows Server 2008 power savings identified as potential green IT initiatives, the next step in moving toward a greener IT environment is to obtain organizational support for these environmentally sustainable, cost-saving initiatives. Quantifying the actual power savings and CO2 reductions is essential to gaining this support.

The free Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit will assess your IT infrastructure and quantify the potential power savings that can be achieved if you consolidate servers and implement power management features on your desktops and servers. The toolkit also helps assess and plan for migration to Hyper-V virtualization, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008.

When planning for a migration or upgrade, you need to know with certainty what computers you have in your environment and what applications have been deployed. The free MAP Toolkit (see Figure 1) makes it easier for you to quickly identify what servers, workstations, and network devices are in your environment. The MAP Toolkit uses a secure and agentless inventory engine to connect to each computer across a network in order to collect hardware, software, and device information, as well as security settings and more. Using a variety of protocols—Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), and many others—the MAP Toolkit will discover machines and collect information about them. The toolkit can support large environments with up to 100,000 computers, storing the collected data in a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express Edition database (or paid versions of SQL Server). This allows the toolkit to quickly analyze your server and desktop infrastructure and generate comprehensive reports, delivering upgrade recommendations and hardware and device compatibility assessments.

Figure 1 The MAP Toolkit User Interface

In addition, the MAP Toolkit can also remotely collect data on the utilization of servers across your infrastructure, including CPU, network IO, and disk IO usage over a period of time. It then quickly identifies which servers are good candidates for virtualization and consolidation using hypervisor technologies, such as Hyper-V.

Configuring Power Settings

The first step in delivering energy and carbon emission savings in your IT environment is to understand and make use of the power management features provided out of the box by the OS.

The fact is, many business users leave their computers on overnight—sometimes by choice, sometimes to comply with IT policy. Leaving systems on can allow for administrative tasks like disk defragmenting, virus scanning, and distributing software updates. Assuming that computers are being utilized for 8 hours per day, 240 days per year, your organization may be paying for an additional 6,840 hours of power per year per computer. These hours of non-use represent an area where significant savings can be realized using settings that are already available to you.

When you use the MAP Toolkit to inventory your desktop operating systems, you obtain the information you need to use the power management features that come with both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Windows XP Power Management Windows XP lets you control the power management features of the display and hard drive and offers features to lower energy use, such as Stand By and Hibernate. To manage power for machines running Windows XP with Service Pack 2, you need to deploy the Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions for Windows XP and manage them with Group Policy preferences. See additional information on the Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions for Windows XP.

Windows Vista Power Management The Windows Vista operating system features significant changes to the power management infrastructure, functionality, and default settings. It provides even greater control for managing power consumption in your environment right out of the box using Group Policy. In fact, nearly all power settings in Windows Vista can be enforced to specific values with Group Policy. You can, for instance, enforce display and sleep idle timeout power settings throughout the entire enterprise. And you can restrict access to power settings on a per-user or per-group basis.

MAP Reporting for Desktops

Figure 2 shows an example of a MAP Toolkit desktop OS inventory report. During the inventory and assessment process, the toolkit discovered 7 different Windows client versions and, more importantly, that 13 client machines are not running Windows Vista. Let's assume that all the machines not running Windows Vista do not have optimized power management settings.

Can you put a price on potential savings? Yes. Migrating these machines to Windows Vista and managing their power settings through Group Policy or even using the Group Policy preferences for Power Options on existing Windows XP with Service Pack 2 machines would lead to a potential energy cost savings of $842.69 per year. Figure 3 outlines some energy and environmental factors and their potential savings.

The United States government backed ENERGY STAR program has published specific guidelines for configuration on Windows client operating systems. These guidelines cover two main categories of operation: display low power mode and system hibernation. Figure 4 outlines these settings.

For more information, see the Microsoft Assessment Configuration Pack for ENERGY STAR Power Management.

MAP Reporting for Servers

For a typical server, managing the power states of the processor represents the greatest opportunity for controlling energy consumption. With Windows Server 2008, Microsoft has configured processor-based power management for use right out of the box.

Figure 5 shows an example of a MAP Toolkit inventory and assessment for Windows Server operating systems. Using this report as an example, you can see the power management opportunities for a variety of Windows Server operating systems.

Windows Server 2003 In Windows Server 2003, performance is optimized by default. By changing the active power policy, this OS can support processor power-saving in your environment. For detailed information on how to enable processor power-management on machines running this operating system, see "How to Enable Processor Power Management in Windows Server 2003."

Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008 includes updated support for Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) processor power management (PPM) features. It includes support for processor performance states (P-states) and processor idle sleep states on multiprocessor systems. These features simplify power management in Windows Server 2008 on a server by server basis, or they can be managed centrally across servers and clients using Group Policy settings.

Figure 6 shows an example of a MAP Toolkit Potential Energy Savings Report, measured in both dollars and greenhouse gas emissions. Using the MAP Server Inventory Report from Figure 5, you can see that 24 physical server machines are not running Windows Server 2008. If the power usage of this environment is actively managed, you can see a potential energy savings of 7,692 kWh per year. (As I mentioned earlier, some tests comparing Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 across similar workloads show a 10 percent decrease in power consumption for machines running Windows Server 2008.)

Data Center Virtualization

Underutilized servers complicate management, they're expensive to maintain, and they are detrimental to environmental sustainability. Server consolidation via virtualization, on the other hand, leads to fewer physical machines, simplifying management and significantly reducing power consumption without sacrificing performance. In order to begin the process of consolidation, you need details about your underutilized servers. How underutilized are they? And where are they?

The MAP Toolkit answers these questions by identifying suitable candidates for virtualization and making recommendations on how physical servers might be placed in a Microsoft Hyper-V virtualized environment. Figure 7 shows an example of the server virtualization report produced by the MAP Toolkit where the server consolidation ratio is 10:1.

Figure 7 Server Consolidation Chart Produced by the MAP Toolkit

Figure 8 shows an example of a MAP Virtualization Server Inventory Report. Using this report as an example, you can see that 47 physical server machines are running in this environment. A recent Microsoft study projected that a machine running Hyper-V with four guest machines used 12,998 kWh per year less than four machines running similar workloads. If you were to move 47 of these machines onto 12 servers through virtualization, you could gain up to $14,810 in annual savings. Figure 9 outlines the savings, also measured in reduced CO2 emissions.

For a detailed explanation of how the MAP Toolkit collects performance metrics and utilization data and assesses virtualization candidacy, see the TechNet Magazine article "Essential Tools for Planning Your Virtual Infrastructure."

Next Steps

Environmental sustainability is a driving force in the next wave of IT initiatives. The benefits of implementing green IT initiatives span your entire organization, measured in both dollars and responsible environmental stewardship. To take the next steps toward achieving environmental sustainability, you should check out the free MAP Toolkit to understand how much energy you consume. This is the first step toward reducing energy consumption in your environment by discovering opportunities for server virtualization and improved power management strategies.