Power On Servers Through IPMI with Citrix Octoblu

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The article Save Money using Citrix Octoblu Automation for Power Management from Dave Brett got me to finally start playing with Octoblu.

We chatted back and forth to improve the PowerShell scripts used, and at the end got some expert help from PowerShell Guru Tore Groneng which lead to his article Giving a helping hand – Community Power.

IPMI and Citrix Octoblu

Now the Octoblu Workflow worked perfectly for my Mac Mini Citrix XenServer Pool. But let’s face it, shutting down a couple of VM’s won’t even save me $1 a month because the XenServers still needs to be running. Same applies for Intel NUC’s and other popular homelab hardware without IPMI.

I’m fortunate enough to own two SuperMicro SYS-5028D-TN4T with IPMI. The Power Consumption with VMware ESXi is 40 watt idle, 90 watt with heavy load and 10 watt with IPMI only. So if I could shutdown my lab for 12 hours each day I would save 57 kWH per month.

IPMI and Citrix Octoblu

This won’t save me much money, but it’s very flexible because I can now start my lab from anywhere in the world on demand if there was any power outtake.

IPMI and Citrix Octoblu

Start SuperMicro Lab

For this I’m using the native PowerShell cmdlet GetPcsvDevice that was introduced in Windows 2008 R2. The first code block convert username and password into $cred which is used later for the credentials.

The startup order and delay is defined on each ESXi host.

IPMI and Citrix Octoblu

Stop SuperMicro Lab

For this I’m using VMware PowerCli to get a controlled shutdown of my VM’s.

ipmi-and-citrix-octoblu

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Automation Framework Community Edition

The fastest way to build your lab environment.

#virtualexpo

Friday 28th of Match 2025

2 thoughts on “Power On Servers Through IPMI with Citrix Octoblu”

  1. Good article – Just Fyi. You may know that XenServer WLB already has this power on/off XenServer host ability years ago based on the host load.

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