I'm looking into the possibility of using Wake On Lan for a machine used in a test lab to run VMs. It doesn't really need to be on all the time, so it would be nice to be able to power it down when it's not being used to save electricity.
Looking through Dell's WoL support documentation, the NIC (Dual Embedded Broadcom® NetXtreme II 5708 Gigabit Ethernet NIC) should supposedly support WoL. The doc is a little old, though, and doesn't discuss Server 2k8, much less 2k8 R2.
Nevertheless, one of the steps in the Server 2k3 configuration details specifies that hibernation support should be enabled; however, when going into the power options for my server, there are no hibernation configuration options in the gui.
I should note that my understanding of WoL is fairly weak. Do systems monitoring the network for magic packets need to be explicitly hibernated, and not shut off as normal? I wouldn't think that the way the OS shut down the system would affect the motherboard's ability to run power to the NIC, but then again this is not my area of expertise.
I will assume for now that hibernation is specifically required. Looking around some more, there seems to be indication that hibernation is not supported for systems that run the Hyper-V role–something to do with the Hypervisor. If this is true, it means that my desired configuration would be impossible. Can anyone provide confirmation or additional detail about this?
Best Answer
I don't know this Dell system, but in all systems I know, you need to turn on WOL in the BIOS. Hibernating Windows would then help with the boot time, but is not required per se.