By default hibernation is not available in Windows Server 2008 and for good reason.  Why would you want your server go into hibernation?  Well there are exceptions when you might want to use hibernation, I just can’t think of any that would involve production servers though. 

In my case one of those exceptions happens to be that I use Windows Server 2008 on my laptop as the primary OS.  Mostly because I like to have an additional machine to test things on before I test them on our other environments; and a few of our developers work on Server installations for their local development environments, so having the ability to reproduce issues on a like environment without touching a server is a plus.  Now that you know why I have Server as my primary OS I’ll explain why I want to be able to hibernate.  It’s pretty simple booting and shutting down the laptop takes way too much time with a Server OS.  I’d rather reboot once during the week and hibernate the machine the rest of the time. 

So now how to enable the hibernate option in the power management settings. It’s just one line that has to be entered at the command prompt and Microsoft has documented it.

powercfg.exe /hibernate on

It’s that simple.  Now you can set your machine to go into hibernation.