Going Green
As it turns out, keeping 25 computers on 24/7 so that people can remote in actually wastes a lot of electricity. I have been looking into ways to make our use of electricity much more efficient, so that we can both reduce our carbon footprint as well as knock a few bucks off the monthly electric bill.
I’m attacking this two ways. The first way is to get all the workstations to sleep when they aren’t in use. The second is to use current virtualization technologies to reduce the number of servers we have.
The idea is that most servers are underutilized, and that you can take better advantage of your hardware and reduce energy usage by running several virtual machines on every real physical machine. The server stuff is going to have to wait until after I’ve dealt with the workstations. But I am hoping to be able to invest any money I save from making the workstations more efficient into the server consolidation project.
The first step in putting the computers to sleep at night was actually enabling Wake on Lan on our Windows XP Dells. Wake on Lan is not enabled by default in the BIOS, nor is it enabled in the power management settings for the network adapter in Windows. In Windows, go into Device Manager, find your NIC, and go to its properties. There will be a power management tab. Make sure you also check off “only allow management stations to bring to bring the computer out of standby,” otherwise the computer will wake up for any network activity, not just a magic packet.
The second step was to figure out a way to make it easy for my users to wake their computers up if necessary. Remembering the MAC address of the NIC on the computer is not exactly practical.
I looked around for a nice little program to keep track of computer names/mac addresses, and I found something quite ideal for our network. We use Small Business Server 2003, and there is a product that integrates Wake on Lan features right into our SBS’s Remote Web Workplace. It will cost me some euros when the trial expires, but in my opinion it is worth it to integrate a Wake on Lan feature right into an application my users are already used to using. It’s called WOL4RWW, and is available from WESSTools.com. I’ve already tested this on a couple of computers and it works great.
After making my computers capable of sleeping and waking up, I needed to figure out a way to actually enforce settings that put these computers to sleep every night. There didn’t seem to be a built-in group policy in Server 2003/Windows XP. It looks like the easiest way to handle this is going to be to install a little piece of software called EZ GPO on the XP machines. This will allow me to manage their power settings remotely. I hope to find time to do this in the next week or two.
The last piece of the puzzle, which I haven’t looked into yet, is when Windows Update is going to run if the computers are sleeping all night.
After I’m done with setting up and testing the XP machines, I believe I can then handle Vista and Windows 7 machines via a GPO. After that, I will find a solution for our Macs.
If you’re interested in making sure your home computer or business network is as green as possible, you can find a wealth of information at the Energy Star website.