Deploying power chute in enviroment with one vcenter and multiple clusters.

[MartinPaidar_apc]

This was originally posted on APC forums on 6/26/2017

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Hello APC experts,

I am fairly new with UPS settings and especially power chute. I went through documentation but I am still very confused. Maybe somebody here can help me.

I have setup like this. One vCenter appliance (6.5) running on vm in data center. In this v center I create separate data centers with clusters for geologically separated location. In each of this locations are one or two UPS and about three ESXi hosts (6.0) (two are in cluster and one is DR). I need to install power chute to protect each cluster with its own ups. And its starting to makes me crazy.

This is what I thought. I create service account which is administrator for each cluster and use it to communicate with the power chute virtual appliance which I will install on the protected cluster. And set it in single or parallel configuration. But I get a lot of communication errors and nothing seems to work correctly.

I am sure that I am doing it wrong but I have no idea how to solve it.

Thank you for your help.

[BillP]

This reply was originally posted by Bill on APC forums on 6/26/2017

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Hi,

I understand you went through the documentation but did you read Application Note 180? How to configure PowerChute for multiple geographic locations is discussed starting on page 11. You need to have vCenter Server running on a physical server at one site not a VM and install PCNS at each site.We recommend having PCNS also running on physical servers but it will also work if running on VMs. The account used by PowerChute to connect to vCenter Server needs to be able to connect directly to each ESXi host at the site in the event that vCenter Server becomes unavailable. Using Active directory and local user accounts is also discussed on the Application Note starting on page 17. 

On 6/26/2017 1:53 PM, Martin said:

This is what I thought. I create service account which is administrator for each cluster and use it to communicate with the power chute virtual appliance which I will install on the protected cluster. And set it in single or parallel configuration. But I get a lot of communication errors and nothing seems to work correctly.

Can you share a screenshot of the error/s? Are the errors between PCNS and the NMC or PCNS and vCenter Server? 

[MartinPaidar_apc · Accepted solution]

This was originally posted on APC forums on 7/4/2017

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Hello Bill,

thank you for your reply. In the end it seems that service account need administrator permission to whole vcenter not only specific virtual data center. Also is it important to run power chute separate of the environment for some reason? Like host with vm wont shutdown etc. ?

Regards

Martin Paidar