BES Power Management

The BES Power Management site allows you to monitor, manage, and control the power usage settings of your computers including:
  • Using Wake-on-LAN* - Power on computers anywhere within your company.
  • Turn off or restart computers - Easily manage restarts and powering off computers with a touch of a button.
  • Aggregate power usage summaries - Finally find the answers to questions like: How many computers are powered off at night? How many computers are left on over the weekends? What percentage of the day are computers on? And so on.
  • View power-saving settings - View a detailed breakdown of the power-savings settings of the computer including hibernation/stand-by settings, hard-drive and monitor shut-down settings, and more.
  • Manage power-savings settings - Looking to save money or become a "greener" company by reducing power usage? You can easily change the power-savings settings across your all computers to optimize power usage.
* Computers must be Wake-on-LAN compatible

Quick-Start Setup Instructions:

  1. Add the Fixlet site masthead.
  2. Open Dashboards > Power Tracking Information. Follow the instructions to enable power tracking statistics to be gathered from your computers (you choose which computers you want to track).
  3. Activate the Analysis called "Windows Power Options Information" to retrieve power setting information from your


Getting Started

First, subscribe to the BES Power Management site (note that BES Power Management requires BES v6.0 and above). Contact your sales representative for the Fixlet masthead and then double-click on the masthead to add it to your BES deployment. After the site subscribes, you will see the BES Console report new Fixlet messages, Tasks, and Analyses along with a new Dashboard and a new Wizard.



Next, access the Power Tracking Information Dashboard by opening the "Dashboards" menu in the BES Console and selecting "Power Tracking Information". This Dashboard is the central "Control Panel" for the BES Power Management site, but you can also access the individual Fixlet messages, Tasks, and Analyses by going to the specific tabs in the BES Console.



When the Dashboard is first opened, everything but the power control panel is hidden from you. To gain access to the statistical information you must first enable power tracking by hitting the "Start Monitoring" button at the top of the dashboard. You will then be prompted to select the computers that you wish to monitor. You may want to make this action a "Policy" action by removing the expiration date so that new computers that come online will be have monitoring enabled automatically.



After you enable the power monitoring, the Dashboard will be populated with several new sections that are described below.

Note: You must manually refresh the dashboard by pressing the "Refresh" button at the top right of the dashboard screen.



Power Tracking Information Dashboard

The Power Tracking Information Dashboard is the centerpiece of the Power Management site. From here you can view important power usage statistical information as well as have quick deployment of Fixlet messages and tasks. The dashboard is divided into four main sections: Power Control, Aggregate Statistics, General Statistics, and Custom Statistics.



- Power Control: Allows quick access to a number of power managing Fixlet messages and tasks.

From here you can have easy access to the "Wake-on-LAN Wizard" which allows you to Wake computers on a given subnet. There are also instructions on how to set up "right click Wake-on-LAN". With this enabled, you can simply right click on a computer in the BES "Computers" tab and select it for WoL - Note that "right-click wake-on-lan" will only work if you are in the same subnet as the BES Clients or if your network allows you to send UDP packets to the broadcast address of different subnets (most networks do not allow this).



Using the Power Settings options, you can deploy an analysis to track Windows Power Options information by selecting the "View power settings" link. With the information provided by this analysis, you can use change the power settings profile for the default user (which is the profile used when no user is logged on to a machine, or when a new user is created) or for the current logged on user. These profiles set options for when the hard disk or monitor turns off, or when the system goes into standby.



There are also a links for deploying reboot or shutdown actions.



- Monthly Power Consumption: Allows for measuring current power usage against the minimum possible power usage (the work day) and maximum power usage (computers always on with no power saving settings).


- Aggregate Statistics: Displays a graph of the number of computers that are powered-on for a given interval, giving a general picture of power usage. Power Monitoring must be enabled for this section to appear.

The graph can display powered-on statistics for the last 2 hours, 8 hours, 24 hours, 7 days 30 days, 27 weeks, or 54 weeks. Each time interval requires a minimum amount of tracking data before it is displayed. At least 10 minutes of data will need to be available before the graph will display information.



Note: You can manually refresh this data by pressing the "Refresh" button at the top right of the dashboard screen.



- General Statistics: Breaks down power usage information.

The General Statistics are designed to give you aggregate power statistics for all the computers that are being tracked. This information is intended to give you a sense of how often computers are turned on and off, useful averages, and a sense of the total aggregate power being used.



- Custom Statistics: Displays a set of statistics about the power-on behavior of computers within a given time interval.

The Custom Statistics are designed to let you "ask questions" about the power usage of the computers. This information can be used to answer questions like "How many people have turned off their computers in the last week?" and so on.



Note: The statistical information is updated immediately after the time interval is changed. The Dashboard does not need to be refreshed.



*Using Wake-on-LAN*

The BES Power Management site includes the ability to power-on a computer using Wake-on-LAN (WoL) technology. Many sources of information about Wake-on-LAN technology can be found on the Internet. Here are a couple:

Before you can use any Wake-on-LAN technology, your computers must have Wake-on-LAN enabled. Most computers built after 2000 have Wake-on-LAN capabilities, but it must be enabled for the network card and in the computer's BIOS. Each computer/network card manufacturer does this differently.


Wake-on-LAN uses small broadcast network packets to power-on computers. This often presents an operational problem because many networks do not route these types of packets from different subnets. Since many companies have hundreds or thousands of subnets, the network limitation is a severe restriction on using Wake-on-LAN*. However, BigFix solves this problem for you because it allows BES Clients to wake up other computers in the same subnet. As long as you have at least one BES Client powered-on in the subnet, you can wake up the other computers.


To set up the Wake-on-LAN (WoL) functionality, go to the "Control Panel" section of the Power Tracking Information Dashboard and click on "Use Wake-on-LAN Wizard" (alternately you can go to Wizards > "Wake-on-LAN Wizard".


The first time you run the WoL wizard it will create a retrieved property called "Wake-On Address".
This property will link a computer's MAC address to its IP address, which will allow BES to know how to wake-up each computer.


Once the wizard has created this property, and the clients have reported back, open the WoL Wizard again. You can now use BES Clients to wake up computers in selected subnet. The wizard will list the subnets available with the number of computers in each subnet.


After selecting a subnet and hitting next, you will be presented with deployment options:

Expiration Time - Sets the length of time BES will attempt to wake computers. You should expire the Wake-on-LAN actions whenever you can because it helps keep system performance optimal.


Temporal Distribution - Sets the span of time between WoL packets. Since the WoL traffic is all on the local LAN, the network speeds tend to be very fast. Nevertheless, as a precaution against sending too much data in a short burst, if there are many computers on a subnet, this setting should be set to a larger time interval.


Wake-up Points - Sets the time in which a client must have reported to be considered a "Wake-up Point".


After selecting finished, the wizard will create a BES action. This action will download the bes-wol utility to the Wake-up Points. The Wake-up points will then send special WoL packets to every computer in the subnet. These packets are sent on port 10 using the behaviors chosen in the wizard. All computers with the BES Client installed will be woken up (as long as Wake-on-LAN is supported by the powered-off computers).


Note: A subnet must have at least one awake computer to awaken other computer within the subnet. A computer cannot awaken a computer on a different subnet.



* The "right-click Wake-on-LAN" feature sends the WoL packets from the BES Console computer directly to the broadcast address of the BES Client's subnet. If your network does not support this type of routing, right-click Wake-on-LAN will only work for computers in the same subnet as the BES Console.