Scheduled DPM

I wanted to reduce the heat generated by my home lab as its in the Loft/Office and wanted to automate any procedure. Decided to enable DPM for the very first time and the task I faced was controlling when DPM was enabled or disabled. If you’re not familiar with DPM its VMware’s vSphere technology that automates ESX hosts placed into standby power mode when overall utilisation is low. My home lab is used for demo and in working hours I didn’t want to have to wait for DPM to power on a standby host mid-demo. So I needed a way of controlling DPM off/on peak. At first I was going to create an API app similar to My Resource Pool Scheduler but then decided this would make a great PowerCLI lesson. I went about finding out how to control DPM using PowerCLI as described >here<. I then used the windows scheduler to activate a DPM-ON script and a DPM-OFF script. It was as simple as that. So 7am DPM is switched off and all standby hosts are powered on. 7pm DPM is switched on allowing for hosts to be placed into standby mode.