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The Environment Is Hot: Citrix Power Smart

Friday, 21 December 2007 by Michel Roth

"Green computing" has got to be one of the most amazing hypes (or should I say trends) I have ever seen. Amazing, why? Well, let's face it: usually IT trends do not serve any real goal out of selling a lot of products or services. For example, I do not think the application virtualization hype trend serves to end world hunger.

So what's my point? A couple of days ago I read an entry at the Citrix blog by Ray Yang. In this article he was introducing something called "Power Smart Utility For Presentation Server". The goal of this tool, in a nutshell, is to power down Citrix Servers whenever they are not being used (during certain periods of time). I think there might be a challenge in having this feature become hugely popular but the mere fact that Citrix seriously considers bringing a tool like this to the market (free or not) says it all.

Citrix Power Smart is installed as a windows service on one Presentation Server which is kept running. We will refer to this server later as the controller. The modification to the controller is small: a small number of files are copied to the installation directory and a windows service is added. There is no registry changes, COM registration etc. Uninstall is supported.

Minimal changes are required on other presentation servers being managed if any.

Use an XML based configuration file on the controller to configure

� the group of Presentation Servers to be power managed
� the "idle power management hours" (also referred to as "off business hours"): the period during which the servers may be powered off
� How frequent the tool checks time and the state of the machines

Configure Load Balancing rules using Presentation Sever consoles to prevent the Presentation Servers which are being power managed to accept new connections during "idle power management hours".

Once configured, the utility will monitor user activity during off business hours using CPS SDK and power off those servers with no active or disconnected sessions. It can be configured to power on servers automatically after getting out of off business hour.

A default mechanism is included to shutdown servers.It can be configured to invoke any custom script/program to power on/off servers. Sample scripts are included to power on/off HP ILO2enabled servers.

Power events are logged in controller event log. Additional debug/test tools are included in the install.

Believe it or not, the environment is hot and I don't mean by global warming. It's the greatest trend I have ever seen. Greenpeace should definitely get into IT!

Here's some more details about Power Smart Utility For Presentation Serverat Ray's blog.

Download the Citrix PowerSmart Utility for Presentation Server (Beta) from CDN.