SCCM Power Management Guide

This post is a complete SCCM power management guide that shows how to create power plans and apply them to Windows devices.

Power Management in SCCM is an interesting feature to explore. Using SCCM power management, you can apply power plans to device collections in your hierarchy. You can also create and apply custom power plans to the computers.

As per Microsoft, a power plan is a collection of hardware settings and system settings that manages how your computer uses power. Power Management in Configuration Manager addresses the need that many organizations have to monitor and reduce the power consumption of their computers.

Why should you enable power management in SCCM?

When you install Windows 10 or Windows 11, you get three built-in power plans. They are balanced (recommended), power saver and high-performance plans.

The challenge is that users tend to change the power plan manually to meet their personal preferences while at work. For example, the user might not like the machine going into sleep mode too often. So the settings could be modified from say 10 minutes to Never. With this setting, the computer never goes into sleep mode and increases the power consumption.

When the users turn on the laptop while they are at home, the same power settings are still applicable. To properly manage power settings on workstations, you may consider using SCCM for power management.

Basics of Power Management in SCCM

Power Management in SCCM is helpful for organizations that have to monitor and reduce the power consumption of their computers. It is also possible to apply different power plans to computers during business hours and non-business hours.

Most importantly, remember that you can apply SCCM power plans to only device collections. You cannot apply it to any user collections.

SCCM Power Plans for Virtual Machines

Configuration Manager power management plans cannot be applied to virtual machines. It is simply not supported, and you cannot report power data used by them.

Some organizations use Windows Group Policy to set the power settings for Windows 10/11 devices. In such situations, when you deploy SCCM power plans, the GPO settings will always override settings configured by Configuration Manager power management.

If your organization uses Intune to manage Windows devices, you can create and apply power plans using Intune effectively.

Applying Power Plans on Windows Servers

Configuration Manager doesn’t support power management of Windows Server, but it still collects power usage data for analysis and reporting. What you can do is add servers to a collection and exclude it from power management.

SCCM Power Management Workflow by Microsoft

Microsoft defines a proper power management workflow for their customers. You should not apply the power plans without analyzing the power data from the client computers. Let’s see the workflow suggested by Microsoft.

• Monitor + Plan: In this step, you first collect data about computer usage and power settings for computers in the site. Based on the data collected, you decide the computers that require power plans and the ones that need to be excluded.
• Deploy Power Plan: You create power plans and deploy it to device collections. At this point, you may use the power plans that come with SCCM or you may create a custom one.
• Compliance: After you apply the power plans, you run reports to evaluate power usage and power cost savings in your organization. This is important because you may want to compare the data before and after applying the power plans. You can also run reports that describe the improvements in the amount of CO2 generated by computers.

Prerequisites

If you have decided to deploy Power plans using SCCM, here are some of the prerequisites.

1. When you configure power management in SCCM, you basically create a power plan and define settings. It is critical that the client computers be able to support sleep, hibernate, wake from sleep, and wake from hibernate actions. You can use the Power Capabilities report to find out which computers support these actions.
2. Ensure you enable power management in SCCM before you create and apply power plans.
3. The computers must be managed with SCCM and have the latest client version installed.

Enable Power Management in SCCM

The option to enable Power Management in SCCM is via the client settings. You can either enable the setting in default client settings or create a custom device client setting and then enable it.

If you enable it in the default client setting, it will apply to all the computers in your hierarchy. So if you are doing a POC, instead of enabling it in default client settings, create a custom device client setting. Assign it to a collection that contains the computers that you deploy power management settings.

The power management of devices can be enabled via the client settings in SCCM using the following procedure:

• Open the SCCM Console.
• Navigate to Administration > Client Settings > Default Client Settings.
• Select Properties and go to the Power Management tab.
• Set Enable Power Management to Yes. Click OK to save the changes.

Configure Power Management Client Settings

• Allow power management of devices: Click the drop-down and select Yes.
• Allow users to exclude their device from power management: By default, this is set to No. You can allow users to opt out of applying the power plans by setting it to Yes.
• Allow network wake-up: When you enable this setting, it configures the power settings on the network adapter to allow the adapter to wake up the device.
• Enable Wake-up Proxy: You must understand how this works before you enable it in your setup.
• Wake-up proxy port number: Clients use the port number 25536 to send wake-up packets to sleeping computers. The default port number can be changed.
• Wake on LAN port number: The default port used for WAKE on LAN is 9. If you change it here, remember to change it under site properties as well.
• Reduce network packets for Modern Standby devices: By default, the value is set to No.

Create and Apply Power Plan in SCCM

Let’s see how you can create a power plan in SCCM and apply it to the devices:

• Launch the SCCM console, click Assets and Compliance.
• In the Assets and Compliance workspace, click Device Collections.
• Click the collection to which you want to apply power management settings. Right-click device collection and click Properties.
• Select the Power Management tab. The settings that we define here apply only to this collection.

Under Configure power management settings for this collection, you see three options.

1. Do not specify power management settings.
2. Never apply power management settings to computers in this collection.
3. Specify power management settings for this collection.

Select the third option.

Set the peak hours, which usually start at 9 AM and end at 5 PM. You may change this based on your requirements.

In the next step, you define a peak plan and a non-peak plan.

Under Peak plan, when you click the drop-down, you see four built-in plans.

• Customized Peak (ConfigMgr)
• Balanced (ConfigMgr)
• High Performance (ConfigMgr)
• Power Saver (ConfigMgr)

You can apply the built-in power plans for peak hours. To customize the plans, select Customized Peak plan and click Edit.

Specify a name and description for the power plan. Under Power plan properties, you can customize settings based on business requirements. Once you configure all the settings, click OK.

You can apply a non-peak power plan for non-business hours and define it. The below screenshots represent the power plans configured for non-peak hours.

Built-In SCCM Power Management Reports

Configuration Manager includes several built-in reports to help you analyze power consumption and computer power settings in your organization. You can also use these reports to help you troubleshoot problems after applying power plans.

In the latest current branch version of Configuration Manager, you get around 18 built-in power management reports. These reports are available in Monitoring > Overview > Reporting > Reports > Power Management.

Allow users to exclude their device from Power Management

When you apply a power plan to a device collection, it applies to all the devices in the collection. If there are a set of devices that you want to exclude from the power plan, you can do that. While the exclusion step has to be manually done by the user in the software center, the configuration manager admin has to first allow the option to do that. Here is a concise guide on how to exclude SCCM devices from power plans.

Best Practices for SCCM Power Management

Organizations can follow these best practices for power plan deployment with Configuration Manager:

• Choose a representative time to monitor the devices.
• Create two collections of computers to help you monitor the effects of applying power plans to computers.
• Run reports before you apply a plan
• Exclude Windows Servers and VMs from Power Plans
• Apply power plans to a test collection
• Apply power plan settings individually
• Regularly monitor computers for multiple power plans
• Save or export power management information