Power Management

Deadline
1

Hi,

I’m looking into making use of the power management in deadline 7… And before I can have a fiddle with the IPMI command to wake them, I am expecting to see Pulse ATTEMPTING to wake them at least after they have all been shut down.

At the moment in pulse it just says

Results from last Machine Startup check: There are no slaves that need to be woken up at this time

I have a job on the farm, other than that are there any other prerequisites that should try to wake the machines?

thanks!

2

Hi Simon,

It could be a few things.
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … ne-startup

  1. Have you ‘enabled’ the “Machine Group” that the “MachineStartup” setting are applied to?
  2. Have you ‘enabled’ the “MachineStartup” tab within the above “Machine Group”?
  3. Are their jobs in your queue, allocated to your farm setup (pools, groups, limits, etc), which after job scheduling logic has been reviewed by Deadline, would cause a machine to be sent the “Machine Startup” command?
  4. Since configuring Pulse, have you waited at least 10 mins for the settings to propagate or restart Pulse?
  5. Do you have more than 1 x Pulse running? Is this the Primary Pulse?
  6. Could you share your PM settings visually?
3

I think all of those conditions have been met. Here are the settings in power management… The machines idle shutdown was fine
Screenshot 2015-07-14 13.19.09.png

Screenshot 2015-07-14 13.19.12.png
Screenshot 2015-07-14 13.19.12.png915×571 64.7 KB

Screenshot 2015-07-14 13.19.14.png
Screenshot 2015-07-14 13.19.14.png915×571 59.2 KB

4

Ah…“Maximum Number of Slaves To Wake Up Per Interval” is currently set to “0” which will essentially disable the feature. The “Idle Shutdown” should be working ok, as the settings look good there?

5

Ahhh thanks.

I should have tried changing it - I thought it was (as it is sometimes) 0 = infinite

As it can be enabled/disabled anyway

thanks! now for WOL/IPMI fun…

6

Yeah, a default value of “0” doesn’t really make sense to me…I’m gonna have a chat with the rest of the team, as I think this needs a tweak.
Thanks for the feedback.

7

Thanks for your help before Mike.

I have WOL working now, and scheduling idle shutdown so that they won’t shut down (idle time very high) during the day.

At the moment is there no way to have them scheduled to turn on in the morning? I saw another thread about this and I think the resolution was that you can schedule start/shutdown the slave software, but not the machine…

8

Hi Simon,

No problem.

You shouldn’t need to do this, but rather use the “Overrides” section table at the bottom of the PM - “Idle Shutdown” section to ‘vary’ the idle time value throughout the day depending on the “Machine Group” currently in question. ie: idle time, Mon-Fri, 9-6pm is 1hr, but outside of these hours, the idle time is 5 mins.

So, our logic is a little different here. If a machine/slave isn’t needed to be on as they are no ‘applicable’ jobs for it in the queue, then it shouldn’t need to be started at a scheduled time. As soon as an applicable job hits the queue, the PM functionality if configured, should start the machine in question up. Our “Slave Scheduling” system allows for further configuration via “Launcher” running, once the machine is booted up, to ensure that Slave is/is not running during a certain time on that machine. Additional Idle Detection/settings are available here as well. Check out the docs here:
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … scheduling

Now, I’m not entirely convinced that I have answered your question here! So, let me know!

9

That is what I’m doing now, shutdown after 30mins default, and overide during work hours to 999 so that they don’t shut down.

I understand the logic of PM, the machine starts when it’s needed - I was mostly concerned that the blades do not boot up super fast, maybe I’ll just leave it as it is for now and see if it’s an issue.

cheers

10

OK. I think using a combo of quite a few of the PM settings under both “Idle Shutdown” & “Machine Startup”, should get you to a good place. Using “Override Shutdown Order” & “Override Startup Order”, together with ‘working hours’ & “Minimum Number of Slaves to Leave Running”. If it helps and your specifically running Windows 8, we have now added support for “Hybrid Shutdown” in Deadline v7.2. This allows for ‘fast startup’, but I believe at the expenses of not saving as much on the electricity bill. So, I think your right, give it a try and see how it goes. :slight_smile: