a mechanism for controlling the hardware resources on a blade server , and thereby limiting the power consumption of the blade server is disclosed . the enforceable hardware resources that are controlled include the base frequency of the central processing unit as well as power to individual banks of physical memory , for example dual - inline memory modules . the hardware resources are tuned in dependence on actual server utilization such that applications running on the blade only have the allocated hardware resources available to them . deactivated hardware resources are powered off and are so ‘ hidden ’ from the operating system when they are not required . in this manner , power consumption in the entire chassis can be managed such that all server blades can be powered on and operate at higher steady - state utilization . the utilization of the powered on resources in a blade center is also improved .