If you have a Hyper-V cluster in a HP Server farm then you may face with low live migration performance. We realized that HP 300 series G6 and G7 servers shipping with energy saving mode. Let’s check that from HP website.

In the ProLiant 300-series G6 and G7 RBSU, the HP Power Profile defines three possible configurations of some of the power features identified earlier in this section. The HP Power Profile provides a simple mechanism for users to configure the power management options of their system based on their tolerance to power versus performance without having to individually configure each option.

There are three possible settings for the HP Power Profile: Maximum Performance; Balanced Power and Performance; and Minimum Power Usage. An additional Custom setting is simply any combination of user settings that do not match the pre-sets for the three categories listed below.

If you want to increase performance of live migration process, you need to disable c-states from BIOS. C-States has a huge impact on live migration. Since HP comes with Balanced Power and Performance mode, it also activates C6 state on BIOS. That’s reason of the issue. So changing HP Power Profile to “Maximum Performance“, you disable C-States from BIOS and get maximum performance from Live migration. As you see our servers can utilize 99% of bandwidth.

So it’s not a good thing to use “Balanced Power and Performance” on Virtualization. Get away from it :)