iDRAC 8/7 v2.30.30.30 User’s Guide

When power cap policy is enabled, it enforces user-defined power limits for the system. If not, it uses the hardware power protection policy that is implemented by default. This power protection policy is independent of the user defined policy. The system performance is dynamically adjusted to maintain power consumption close to the specified threshold.

Actual power consumption may be less for light workloads and momentarily may exceed the threshold until performance adjustments are completed. For example, for a given system configuration, the Maximum Potential Power Consumption is 700W and the Minimum Potential Power Consumption is 500W. You can specify and enable a Power Budget Threshold to reduce consumption from its current 650W to 525W. From that point onwards, the system's performance is dynamically adjusted to maintain power consumption so as to not exceed the user-specified threshold of 525W.

If the power cap value is set to be lower than the minimum recommended threshold, iDRAC may not be able maintain the requested power cap.

You can specify the value in Watts, BTU/hr, or as a percentage (%) of the recommended maximum power limit.

When setting the power cap threshold in BTU/hr, the conversion to Watts is rounded to the nearest integer. When reading the power cap threshold back, the Watts to BTU/hr conversion is again rounded in this manner. As a result, the value written could be nominally different than the value read; for example, a threshold set to 600 BTU/hr will be read back as 601 BTU/hr.