Dell iDRAC8 manual Power Capping, Executing Power Control Operations Using Racadm

•Power Off System

•NMI (Non-Masking Interrupt)

•Graceful Shutdown

•Reset System (warm boot)

•Power Cycle System (cold boot)

3.Click Apply. For more information, see the iDRAC Online Help.

Executing Power Control Operations Using RACADM

To perform power actions, use the serveraction command. For more information, see the iDRAC8 RACADM Command Line Interface Reference Guide available at dell.com/support/manuals.

Power Capping

You can view the power threshold limits that covers the range of AC and DC power consumption that a system under heavy workload presents to the datacenter. This is a licensed feature.

Power Capping in Blade Servers

Before a blade server powers up, iDRAC provides CMC with its power requirements. It is higher than the actual power that the blade can consume and is calculated based on limited hardware inventory information. It may request a smaller power range after the server is powered up based on the actual power consumed by the server. If the power consumption increases over time and if the server is consuming power near its maximum allocation, iDRAC may request an increase of the maximum potential power consumption thus increasing the power envelope. iDRAC only increases its maximum potential power consumption request to CMC. It does not request for a lesser minimum potential power if the consumption decreases. iDRAC continues to request for more power if the power consumption exceeds the power allocated by CMC.

After, the system is powered on and initialized, iDRAC calculates a new power requirement based on the actual blade configuration. The blade stays powered on even if the CMC fails to allocate new power request.

CMC reclaims any unused power from lower priority servers and subsequently allocates the reclaimed power to a higher priority infrastructure module or a server.

If there is not enough power allocated, the blade server does not power on. If the blade has been allocated enough power, the iDRAC turns on the system power.

Viewing and Configuring Power Cap Policy

When power cap policy is enabled, it enforces user-defined power limits for the system. If not, it uses the hardware power protection policy that is implemented by default. This power protection policy is independent of the user defined policy. The system performance is dynamically adjusted to maintain power consumption close to the specified threshold.

Actual power consumption may be less for light workloads and momentarily may exceed the threshold until performance adjustments are completed. For example, for a given system configuration, the Maximum Potential Power Consumption is 700W and the Minimum Potential Power Consumption is 500W. You can specify and enable a Power Budget Threshold to reduce consumption from its current

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