UPS(APC) initiated shutdown of ESXi

I’ve been waiting for APC to create a VIMA ready package of their PowerChute Network Shutdown software for a while now. It’s supposed to be released soon but I haven’t heard a release date yet.

For everyone that can’t wait VMTN User “jholland” created this PDF “How to configure ESXi to shutdown using an APC SmartUPS“. It’s a great creative solution that shuts down your vm’s and host when a power failure occurs keep in mind you need a UPS with network management capabilities. In short:

add a script to your ESXi box and enable ssh with public key authentication
add a debian VM
install APC UPS daemon
edit the APC UPS daemon config file which calls the script(1.) via ssh/public key

I guess the APC solution will work in a similar way by the way, but the APC solution will be full supported and this solution clearly isn’t cause you would need to alter ESXi. (The APC solution will use the RCLI/Perl toolkit probably)

I can imagine you would want to use it anyway. Thanks to jholland for creating this PDF, it’s his first post I hope there’s more to come! (By the way, it isn’t that difficult to apply this information on VIMA. I might test it out this week and update you guys)

Darlin says:

Monday, February 9, 2009 at 15:53

We have a small VM with Debian + Network UPS Tools.
The shutdown is done by a Perl Script over the Perl API.
Works great.

John van der Sluis says:

Monday, February 9, 2009 at 17:34

I’ve designed a similar setup for a customer in 2006 on vmware 2.5.3 and a APC Symmetra 40K. I had to setup a Red Hat 9 helper vm for the purpose of PowerChute Network deployment on ESX. The most diffucult part was configuring the InfrastruXure Manager and the specific UPS shutdown parameters like the Return Battery Capacity, Low-Battery Duration and Shutdown Delay values. You have to think about which situation you want a shutdown of your machines. In the event of a power outage you dont want to shutdown machines right away if you have a UPS that can sustain a 5 minute power outage.

The result was a fully controlled shutdown of VMs in a specific order and the ESX hosts in the event of a 10 minute power outage. Sadly we couldnt fully test it.

John.

Tom says:

Monday, February 9, 2009 at 18:40

Please do consider working on this in VIMA as you suggest you may do. It would help a lot of people, as would any clarifications you can provide about the 2.2.3 version which everyone has had to pay for.

Eric van der Meer says:

Monday, February 9, 2009 at 21:01

Because of the slow response from APC and their software we now only sell HP UPS in combination with VMware ESX and HP EVA.

I really don’t understand why APC don’t release a new version of the VMware ESX agents for the APC PowerChute Network Shutdown.

Thanks for the share though!

jholland says:

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 19:01

@Tom – I am currently re-writing the tutorial for upload to http://viops.vmware.com, I am including how to install the apcupsd software within VIMA. About the 2.2.3 version of PCNS, I don’t use it in this tutorial. The abilty of the SmartUPS to send PCNS shutdown commands is there in the UPS regardless of whether you buy a license to install PCNS on Windows/Linux/whatever. Also because we are sending a shutdown command from the host itself to shutdown the VMs, you don’t need PCNS installed on the guests, just the VMTools so the host can shut the guests down gracefully.

Thanks Duncan for sharing this with everyone.

matrix_a123 says:

Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 07:19

To all,

I was testing the ESXi’s VIMA server, which is a cut-down version of Red Hat Ent linux, also used the APC’s PCNS for VIMA and had to give it up as my client’s sites don’t all contain APC UPS devices. So my recommendation was move into using the Network UPS Tools (or NUT V2.0.3) software, it works! I have scripts to monitor each UPS, a few modified perl toolkit scripts to shutdown VMs, iSCSI SAN and the hosts/cluster.

Rob.C.