Citrix Demonstrates Technique to Save Server Power

Citrix has released PowerSmart Utility for Citrix Presentation Servers, enabling idle servers to be turned off during

I am going to contact he Citrix team to see what they have done to create logs to record successful and unsuccessful power down events.  This log could be a simple way to monitor the power on/off events.  They have architected the solution to use one presentation server as the controller, making this the ideal place to monitor the power on/off events.

This same power on/off log would be great for Windows to monitor power management. This will be a long conversation with Microsoft and a challenge to find the right people who would be willing to do this, but it is on my list of things to do.

Appended Jan 3, 2008.

I missed the area of the Citrix FAQ.  Great thinking went into this v1 feature.

What trouble shooting support is included?

By default, some basic information such as when the tool decides to power on/off a server will be logged in the event log of the server running this tool. The servers being shutdown/power off will have the power events logged as usual. The debug tracing is flexible and can be configured to trace only the information you want and to where you want it. Various debugging tools are included to help testing individual components separately. Please see the user guide for more details.

Comments

[Ray Yang]

Hi,

I am the lead developer for the Citrix PowerSmart project.

I found your blog interesting.

Regarding your question about logging power events, please refer to the FAQ page and user guide for more information. You can find the link to the FAQ page from the download page. Basically the controller server will log the power on/off actions it generates. And you can configure how much details to log. However it doesn't monitor other servers' power events if it is what you are asking.

Please contact me if you have further questions.

Thanks

Ray

[Dave Ohara]

Ray,

Thanks for commenting, and I had read your FAQ, but missed the last paragraph that documents your logging feature. This is great to see that you have added this feature.

I hope your feature gets more momentum. I'll gladly tell others of how you save energy in an intelligent manner.

-dave

[Ron]

Interested IT managers are encouraged to visit Alpiron (http://www.alpiron.com/citrix-powersmart-utility ) for a system that turns server on/off according to demand, monitors servers for load and health, sports sophisticated but simple policy management and is hardware independent (IBM, HP, Dell etc.). It is designed for use with Citrix and Terminal Services.