I posted on this earlier, but wanted to follow up with some posts by some smarter folks, Mike Laverick, Chris Wolf, and VirtualGeek have now all blogged on this, and the general consensus is that DPM is still “experimental” and unless there is a compelling reason, it may be best not to play with fire.  My favorite quote “it would brave man who would rely on a magic packet to power on an ESX host. For me in the world corporate datacenters – the only thing that powers on or off a physical host is human being authorized by change-management request…”

Read the posts and decide for yourself:

Mike Laverick – http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?p=691

Chris Wolf – http://www.chriswolf.com/?p=203

Virtual Geek – http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/12/does-vmware-dpm-shorten-esx-server-lifespan.html

DPM or Distributed Power Management, is like VMware’s DRS on Steroids. It is the evolution of the DRS or Distributed Resource Scheduling concept. For those that don’t know what DRS is, I will do the needful and link the VMware Marketing Page for it. Here it is in a video:

Now that you get the basics of it, lets talk about what this means.  It means lower power utilization across all hosts. It means that the hippies on your door step will praise you, and that the Obama administration will hold you up on high for your cutting edge example of how you are helping the environment.

What it also means, is that in all likely hood you are powering up, and down servers that were designed to be powered on 100% of the time. This can potentially lead to more hard drive, and other failures. Hardware manufactures are testing against this now to ensure that it doesn’t do anything drastic to MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures). At the same time that are also working on other power saving technologies (speed stepping the processors, spinning down unused disks, memory enhancements, etc) that will also go a long way in this space.

So while it’s really cool (that’s a techie term right there), I would still strongly recommend testing it out before deploying it within your environment.