Apart from Virtulization we can shut servers whenever it is not being used to save power.
At my office, we used to keep Antivirus server running 24×7, to get latest definition updates & to let users fetch. This was not necessary to keep server ON whole night as there was no user. Also we had same situation for Squid server & Samba, NFS share.
All these servers were required to be up & running before employees enters office.
In other words we required to keep all servers running 5 days a week. It was of no use to keep it running during nights & weekend.
Using Wake-on-lan we could get all server up before office hours.
We use NAGIOS, this one is ON 24×7 to monitor links & live servers.
By configuring Cronjob on Nagios we got all servers UP before office hours.
etherwake / ether-wake is available on almost all distro. you can get server up
ether-wake MACADD
to install ether-wake
Centos – yum install ether-wake
Ubuntu – apt-get install etherwake
