BigFix Power Management: New Features Released

Usage and Config
1

(imported topic written by naveedm)

We are pleased to announce the release of a set of enhancements to our Wake-on-LAN feature set.

These new enhancements – named “On-Demand Wake-on-LAN” – leverage the capabilities included in version 7.1 of the BigFix Platform.

View screen shots of the new functionality:

Please see the following KB article to learn how to take advantage of this new functionality: http://support.bigfix.com/cgi-bin/kbdirect.pl?id=491.

With these enhancements, any 7.1 Client can be designated as a “Wake-on-LAN Forwarder”, so organizations may choose to designate all Clients to be Wake-on-LAN forwarders. Doing so will make it much more likely that a forwarder (wake-up point) will be active in each subnet.

This new capability is also particularly helpful for organizations that have a large population of users that need to remote into their machines from home, as it is not Action-based. Instead, On-Demand Wake-on-LAN requests are sent via a UDP message which is much more efficient and scalable, particularly for customers that have hundreds or thousands of users that remote into their machines every night.

For a list of all recently released Power Management enhancements please see http://forum.bigfix.com/viewtopic.php?id=2205, http://forum.bigfix.com/viewtopic.php?id=2047, http://forum.bigfix.com/viewtopic.php?id=1871, http://forum.bigfix.com/viewtopic.php?id=1752 and http://forum.bigfix.com/viewtopic.php?id=1652.

Lastly, as a reminder, BigFix Power Management has been certified by major energy utilities so customers with BigFix Power Management may be eligible for rebates as high as $15 per computer.

For more information about rebates or if you would like a free trial of BigFix Power Management to determine savings potential within your organization, please contact your sales representative or email sales@bigfix.com.

We hope you enjoy the new features and stay tuned for many more!

Naveed

2

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

Is Linux / Solaris Support on the horizon for Power Management? It would be great to be able to generate reports across the board.

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(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hey jspanitz,

Certain parts of Power Management are supported by Unix/Linux (like wake-on-lan), but we don’t currently allow you to change your power settings on these OSes like we do for Windows/Mac. The main reason for this is that not many people are interested in managing low power settings on their servers (it doesn’t really make much sense to put a Unix server in standby) and so we haven’t really heard any demand for these OSes… Maybe we will change that if more people think it will be useful.

Ben

4

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

Ben,

Understood. What we really wanted was the power measurement / reporting functionality. We were looking for an across the board way of reporting on our entire environment. As for the ability to change those settings, not really needed as far as we are concerned.

One other thing. Seems like Virtual servers are reporting back the same usage as physical servers. Perhaps it is because we just started testing the Power Management features this week and it hasen’t had enough time to collect the data. But from what I read the usage information is mostly calculated from profiles. Is there some way to correct this?

And if we could collect power usage from our VMware ESX servers, would there be some way of correlating the physical host usage to the virtual guests running on a host? In other words, is BigFix going to become “virtualization aware?”

Thanks Again,

John