Distributed Power Management (DPM) is used when there are periods of relative low resource utilization to increase the consolidation ratio on fewer Oracle VM Servers. DPM dynamically migrates virtual machines from under-utilized Oracle VM Servers. When there are Oracle VM Servers without virtual machines running the Oracle VM Server can be powered off, conserving power until the Oracle VM Server is needed again.

DPM aims to keep only the minimum necessary number of Oracle VM Servers running. If a periodic check reveals that a Oracle VM Server's CPU utilization is operating at below a user-set level, virtual machines are live migrated to other Oracle VM Servers in the same server pool.

When all virtual machines are migrated, the Oracle VM Server is shut down.

If an Oracle VM Server exceeds the DPM policy CPU threshold, Oracle VM Manager looks for other Oracle VM Servers to migrate virtual machines to from the busy Oracle VM Server. If no powered Oracle VM Servers are available, Oracle VM Manager finds and starts an Oracle VM Server using its Wake-On-LAN capability. When that Oracle VM Server is running, Oracle VM Manager off-loads the virtual machines from the busy Oracle VM Server to the newly started Oracle VM Server to balance the overall load. It is a prerequisite that all the servers that participate in DPM have Wake-On-LAN enabled in the BIOS for the physical network interface that connects to the dedicated management network.

Oracle VM Manager allows you to specify a DPM threshold for each server pool, and to choose which Oracle VM Servers participate in the policy.

See Define or Edit Server Pool Policies in the Oracle VM Manager User's Guide for information on enabling and configuring DPM in a server pool.