[Gllug] power usage utility?

[Christopher Hunter]

On Mon, 2010-01-18 at 12:32 +0000, Oliver Howe wrote:
> 
> Is there a way of  finding out how much electricity a server is using
> without having to power it down and plug in a ampmeter?
> 
> I need to know how much power each server is using in order to make
> some cost savings at our data centre,
> but obviously it would cause some problems if I have to power them
> down and up again.
> 
> The servers run on centos 5.x , fedora 4, solaris 5.7, freebsd 6.2.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Oliver

The servers themselves won't help you, no matter what OS they're
running!  

The manufacturer's specifications for the machines should give you a
fairly accurate consumption figure, but if you want to get real numbers,
you'll have to use a "clamp meter".  These are inductively coupled
current sensors, so are non-intrusive, and the better ones will read to
0.1A (the most accurate one I ever used was made by Fluke and plugged
into one of their multimeters).

Good quality clamp ammeters aren't cheap - see if you can borrow one
from a friendly electrician!

C.

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