After my last blog on power management, I got a few questions from people who said their desktops were doing something completely different. Hopefully, we all have an understanding as to how XenDesktop 5 deals with power management. If not, I suggest you read the blog called “What is XenDesktop 5 Power Management Doing“. Basically, the question said something like the buffer settings weren’t working and neither was the peak load setting. As it turned out, these were assigned desktops and not pooled. Things work a little differently if you are working with assigned desktops. An assigned desktop belongs to a single user, whereas pooled is a free for all. Of course there are pooled-static desktops and dedicated desktops; both of which are considered assigned for this example.

With pooled desktops we try to anticipate loads and have an appropriate number of desktops idle before users request them. Because any user can use any pooled desktop, this approach works pretty well. But things are a little different if we are talking about assigned. We want to have the assigned desktops ready so the user doesn’t have to wait for the desktop to start, and we all know how users hate to wait.

In XenDesktop 5, power management for assigned desktops is slightly different. Because assigned is a 1:1 approach, we essentially want all desktops to be ready when we hit our morning rush (peak). This is what power management does. When you define the peak time, you are telling power management to start all assigned desktops at this time. When we hit offpeak time, those same desktops will be turned off if they are idle with no logged on users.

To see if this is enabled for the desktop group, loor the paramek foter AutomaticPowerOnForAssigned when you run the following PowerShell command and

Get-BrokerDesktopGroup 'groupname'

What if you don’t want to have power management do this? Then disable it via PowerShell

Set-BrokerDesktopGroup 'groupname' –AutomaticPowerOnForAssigned $false

Hopefully, that helps explain some of the oddities with power management.

Daniel – Lead Architect
XenDesktop Design Handbook