Guidance Help

[Anonymous user]

I was wondering if anyone could help me out with my setup. My company wants me to install PowerChute Network Shutdown on our Virtual environment and I am lost. Ive been reading up on this for sometime now and keep finding myself having issues. Ive found what i thought to be useful guides that get me pretty far but then fail. Any help would be apperciated. 

My setup is this 

1 data center, 1 cluster, 3 ESXi Hosts 5.5.0, with 31 VMs attached to the hosts. 

From my reading I am finding its best to install a virtual appliance to the host to control all the VMs but I am not familar with Linux. So what I have done is installed PCNS on all 31 of my VM's. I am fairly certain if a power outage occurs it will result in th VMs being powered down which is my number one goal at the moment. But what worries me is when the power is restored my three hosts will not power back on because the software isnt installed on them. So this means my Vms will stay down until I manually power back on the hosts. Does this sound correct so far?

How should I properly get this installed, does anyone have a good guide for newb Linux users that will walk me through the entire process? Thanks for your time.

[BillP]

Michael,

You do not need to install the PowerChute Appliance. PowerChute can be installed on a Windows system that will power down the ESXi hosts if you have vCenter server managing the hosts and VMs? Also, have you received any VMware training?

[Anonymous user]

Hello Bill,

Thanks for the reply. Out of the 31 VMs we have running one of them is setup as the VMserver. The VMserver has PCNS installed on it. I do not know if the VMserver is managing the hosts though. I do see a service called VMare VirtualCenter Server running on the VM.

[BillP]

Michael,

vCenter Server is designed to managed the VMware hosts, clusters, and VMs. PowerChute integrates with vCenter to gracefully shutdown the VMs and the host/s in the event of a power outage. PowerChute should not be installed on the VM that has vCenter installed on it. It sould be on its own VM or a standalone Windows system.
Application Note 180 and the users guide should help you understand the possibile configurations. I recommended the configuration on page 3 of application note 180 "vCenter Server running on a VM; PowerChute is installed on a physical machine" since you are not familiar with Linux. You should also get training in VMware since this is a complex enterprise configuration.

[Anonymous user]

Hello Again Bill,

Thanks for the reply. I guess the main reason I am confused on all this is, ive seen 4-5 different documents and forums talking about setting up and installing powerchute. How exactly does PcnS communicate with vCenter? Is there a plugin or something for it? Right now since I have PCNS installed on all my VMs and they are pointed to the UPS and able to communicate with in your opinion what is the major downside?

I guess I dont understand how having PCNS installed on one VM or one machine will communicate the shutdowns to the hosts and other VMs. I am probably missing a installation of something i imagine.

[Anonymous user]

Hey Bill,

I made some headway here and I wanted to see if you thought this was correct. I went around uninstalled PCNS on all of my VMs. I downloaded and installed PCNS on a new VM i created, I configured it for VMsupport followed the prompts pointed towards the vCenter Server IP when asked, then pointed towards UPS ip and applied username and password.

Previously I didnt have the Virtualiation Setting as a tab in PCNS but I do now. Is this all that really needed to be done? Will a power failure now communicate the shutdown terms with my VMs/hosts and power them back on when power is restored?

Thanks for all your help so far!

[BillP]

Michael,

What VM did you install PowerChute on? If you did not install the PowerChute Appliance or VMware vMA they your setup is not supported. I assume that you did not since you wrote earlier that you did not understand Linux and both of those options are Linux.

You can install PowerChute on a standalone Windows system and have it communicate with vCenter server. The Windows system cannot be a virtual machine. The reason for this is when the shutdown starts the VMs are the first to be powered down and since PowerChute is running on a VM it will get shutdown stopping the process. If PowerChute is running on the appliance or on the vMA those OS have special services running so they do not get shutdown until the last moment allow the process to complete.

Also, have you followed the steps in application note 180 concerning active directory and setting up local account? A local account needs to be created on each ESXi server/host since vCenter is running on a VM. The local account will be used to shut the servers/host down once vCenter is shut down.

[Anonymous user]

Good Morning Bill,

I went with what was on page 4 B) Both vCenter Server and PowerChute are running on Virtual Machines.

I am going to find a laptop in office that I can use as the standalone machine and setup powerchute on that. Would that work still? I can probably fit it on the server rack somewhere.

As for AD user setting I didnt know that was actually needed in the setup. Since reading on the setup for B it didnt mention using an AD account for login permissions for the shutdown. I will attempt to go over this a bit more. Just let me know if a laptop will work for the standalone Windows Machine.

[Anonymous user · Accepted solution]

Hey Bill I went ahead and installed PCNS on a standalone Windows Machine, I skipped the laptop and used an older workstation I had in office.