Windows Server 2008 Hibernation

As the Technical Editor for the forthcoming book, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Unleashed (Sams Publishing), I'm doing a lot of work with Windows Server 2008.

It seems that W2K8 Server enables hibernation by default. This is quite interesting since I'm not sure how many people actually hibernate a server. Nevertheless, it's something we need to deal with. Particularly for those (like me) who do most of their work in VMs.

As you may know, Windows creates a file named hiberfil.sys in the root of the system drive for systems where hibernation is enabled. The hiberfil.sys file is always the same size as physical RAM. In a VM where hibernation is normally replaced with the VM software's suspend feature, that can be quite a sizeable chunk of wasted space. In a production environment I would normally want to disable hibernation, too.

Trouble is, you can't disable hibernation anywhere in the GUI. It must be disabled from the command line using the command:

powercfg.exe /hibernate off

This is further documented in the following MS KB articles:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920730
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929658
• How to Disable Hibernation on Windows Vista

Posted by Jeff Guillet 8:40 PM