Esxi Standalone Network Shutdown PCNS

[BillP]

Hi All,

Hope you can help clear up a few questions I have around the vmware appliance and shutdown of a standalone ESXI host.

As an example:

We have a single host configured with a 4.1 APC vmware appliance installed it has 30 minutes of battery remaining at 100%.

We have set the NMC installed to trigger low battery condition with 18 minutes to go (this includes the 2 minutes statutory shutdown on the nmc delay).

We have configured the appliance to shutdown the os after 120 seconds after a low batt condition above leaving 16 minutes of actual power to shutdown everything.

I have also set the vm to shutdown with a 30 second delay between and also set it to guest shutdown as per the guides.

The question I have is how does this work once the trigger happens does it shutdown all vm's at once with 20 seconds between them delay in the order specified under virtual machine startup/shutdown, and what happens after they are all down does the host shutdown or does it literally wait the 120 seconds start the shutdown and then the vms have just 2 minutes to shutdown before the os goes into maintenance and then shutdown at the host level?

thanks

Lee

[BillP]

Lee,

When PowerChute receive the low battery signal from the NMC it start the shutdown process immediately. Any delays are ignored so once the NMC reports the battery has less than 18 minutes of battery life remaining PowerChute will start the shutdown sequence. 

On 8/18/2016 11:26 AM, Lee said:

The question I have is how does this work once the trigger happens does it shutdown all vm's at once with 20 seconds between them delay in the order specified under virtual machine startup/shutdown, and what happens after they are all down does the host shutdown or does it literally wait the 120 seconds start the shutdown and then the vms have just 2 minutes to shutdown before the os goes into maintenance and then shutdown at the host level?

This is described in VMware Knowledge Base document 1004421 copied below. 

Shutdown delay is the maximum time the ESX host will wait for a shutdown command to complete. If the Virtual Machine does not shutdown within the delay time  specified a power off is issued to the Virtual Machine.

When an ESX host is shut down, the host follows this process:

1. Autostart Manager initiates the automatic shutdown of the first Virtual Machine. The shut down is one of the power operations (Power Off, Guest Shutdown or Suspend) depending on the configuration.
2. Autostart Manager waits the amount of time specified in the Shutdown Delay parameter for the Virtual Machine to complete the power operation.
   
   1. If the power operation is completed in less time than specified in the Shutdown Delay, the ESX host begins to shut down its next Virtual Machine.
   2. If the power operation is not completed within the time specified in the Shutdown Delay, the ESX host sends a power off command then then begins to shut down its next Virtual Machine.

[BillP · Accepted solution]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for your post.

Just want to send over some screenshots just to be 100% sure we have our setup right we are basically running on a battery with 38 mins runtime remaining we want at 20 minutes left on battery to start shutting things down as we think thats the time needed to shutdown.

So NMC we have the following set

SO Low batt is set to 20 minutes (from talking with an APC rep who confirm this was correct) this is the time the NMC will wait before issuing a low battery condition to the PCNS clients.

Shutdown delay is the default 2 minute waiting time built into the NMC.

Then we have this set on the ESXI PCNS

So from your message we need to increase this value as I believe you have stated that once the low batt is sent after 20 minutes the host is set to turn off the guest VM's but will force power them off after 120 seconds with this set above and then shutdown the host.

It  then works top to bottom on this list below shutting down vm's however again I need to incrase the shutdown delay as that is the amount of time I am giving Esxi to shutdown the VMs probably about 1-2 minutes on each should suffice so set to 120 seconds per vm?

Hope this helps understand our setup and what we are trying to achieve and I appreciate the help.

thanks

Lee