Motivation

We have many machines and server hardware in our SUSE datacenters meaning physical hardware using electrical power. During this hack week project I would like to find out information about the current use of hardware within our scope, look into monitoring and measurement best practices or existing solutions, e.g. power metering data from PDUs. Then I would like to think about and at best prototype solutions how we can prevent unused, idling machines wasting power, feed back information from the hardware in used to users, e.g. cost of executing jobs in financial currency like € as well as ecological impact like kg CO2e. Also I am thinking about making existing hardware reusable for other purposes when it's not needed for other purposes, e.g. using openQA workers as hypervisor for personal virtual machines in parallel.

Goals

• G1: General overview about current power usage of SUSE LSG QE hardware in our datacenters
• G2: Overview about existing best practices and industry standards for efficient hardware usage in datacenters
• G3: Budgeting information available to end-users
• G4: Concept about using existing hardware for multiple workloads

Execution

• Research existing best practices and industry standards for hardware inventory and power usage monitoring
• Gather existing power usage of SUSE LSG QE hardware in our datacenters from PDUs or the SUSE general sustainability report and breaking down what our use ratio is
• Prototype power usage budgeting to users, e.g. in openQA jobs
• Try out harvester/longhorn or simply a general hypervisor like libvirt on an openQA worker and look into security or performance implications. Also for libvirt maybe some kind of cluster approach unless harvester is already the way to go and can be combined with openQA?

Progress

Day 1

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Results

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