ESXi & vCSA 6.5

[Anonymous user]

Hi,

I am having some problems getting the ESXi 6.5 hosts to shutdown correctly.

Our infrastructure consists of three ESXi hosts running various VM's, one of which is the vCSA.

I have PCNS running on a physical Windows server, which also provides DNS for our network.

I do NOT have Active Directory in use.

PCNS is successfully communicating with both the NMC in the UPS, and the vCSA, two of the ESXi hosts will go into maintenance mode, but the ESXi host running the vCSA will not go into maintenance mode. I then get an error saying that the ESXi hosts have failed to shutdown.

After consulting the PCNS error logs, I can see that there is a permission errors:

ERROR Thread-27 com.apcc.m11.components.WebServer.util.virtualization.VMWareConnection - Unable to log directly into host (NoPermission or InvalidLogin): esxi-1.psdn.lan

and

ERROR Thread-52 com.apcc.m11.components.Shutdowner.Hosts.ESXManagedHost - checkForVCSAVMAndHostInCriticalHosts - cannot obtain HostSystem using findByIP and findByDnsName for critical host esxi-1.psdn.lan

And after consulting the APC VMware User Guide, I see that I need to create a Shared User account with the same credentials on both the ESXi hosts and the vCSA.

I have a little brain fog and its unclear to me on exactly how to achieve this!

On the ESXi hosts, I can log in with a simple user account such as root.

However, on the vCSA, I am unable to use such simple user accounts, I have to use administrator@vsphere.local for example.

I have created an account on each ESXi host, apcupsmgmt. I then created the same user account on the vCSA. However, when I create this apcupsmgmt account on the vCSA, I cannot login to vCSA with just apcupsmgmt, it has to have the @vsphere.local apended to it to allow login.

How do I create the required shared account on both the ESXi host and the vCSA?

Thanks for your help.

[BillP]

Hi,

Is VCSA running on Windows of Linux? If on Linux you need to create the apcupsmgmt account on the system and then follow the instructions in Schneider Electric FAQ FA241010 If VCSA is running on Windows you can follow the instruction from the FAQ to add the user. 

An example for Linux run the adduser and passwd commands to add the user. 

adduser apcupsmgmt

passwd APCpassword

[Anonymous user]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for your reply.

I think I haven't explained myself very well.

The vCentre Server is running as an appliance on one of the ESXi hosts, so I would imagine that it is a Linux based system. It was installed via the ISO downloaded from VMware.

I can login to the vCSA via the CLI as root. However, the adduser commend does not work.

I am missing something simple here I am sure!

Thanks,

Dorian

[Anonymous user]

I think I have managed to sort this out!

I logged in to the vCSA via ssh as root, used the useradd command to create the new user apcupsmgmt and the passwd command to create the password for the new account.

I then tried to login to the vCSA web client with the new account, but of course this did not work! Reason for that is that there were no permissions set in the vCSA web client for the new user! This is easily done from the permissions tab in the vCSA web client.

I can now login to the vCSA web client with the new apcupsmgmt account, and the PowerChute web GUI has accepted the username using the localos/apcupsmgmt format.

Error logs are no longer showing permission errors!! Yay!

I am not onsite to fully test a shutdown procedure, but I feel it will work now!

But one door opens, and another closes in my case, the logs are now saying "Available runtime has been exceeded." Which is odd as the UPS reports a 30.5% load and 45 minute run time! More reading is in order!

[BillP · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Runtime Exceeded is explained in the User's Guide page 101, by clicking on help in PCNS or by reviewing Schneider Electric FAQ FA241713

If you have not done so you need to increase the low battery threshold of the network card to include the time needed for the VMs/vApps, VCSA, PCNS to power down and up. As an example: if VMs needed 120 seconds to power down, 120 seconds to power up, and VCSA needs 240 seconds to power down the low battery threshold on the network card needs to be 12 minutes. 120 +120 + 240 = 480 plus 120 for PCNS and 120 buffer = 12 minutes. 

I also recommend you review "Sample shutdown scenarios" starting on page 83 of the User's Guide.