Is vMA or PowerChute Appliance required for PCNS 3.1 for VMware ESXi

[rillo71_apc]

This was originally posted on APC forums on 4/14/2014

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Hi, do anyone know if the vMA is REQUIRED or not in a configuration like this.

1 Physical Windows 2008 R2 with PCNS 3.1 installed and configured with VMware ESXi host options

1 VMware ESXi 5.1 server

1 APC 1500 mgmt board

4 VMs but no vMA or PowerChute Appliance

I'd like to Shutdown the Host and have the settings for VMs "Shutdown with the host" with the PCNS from the Physical server without any vMA

Page 10 and 11

http://www.apcmedia.com/salestools/PMAR-9DNLQK/PMAR-9DNLQK_R0_EN.pdf

[BillP]

This reply was originally posted by Bill on APC forums on 4/14/2014

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Hi,

You do not need to install PCNS on a vMA or install the Appliance in your configuration. PCNS client installed on the Windows system will sent the shut down signal to the VMware host.

Note: In order to gracefully shut down VMs, you must use the Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown settings for the VMware host in the vSphere Client. This is accessible on the Configuration tab under Software in the vSphere Client.

[rillo71_apc]

This was originally posted on APC forums on 4/15/2014

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Hi Bill and thank you for your respons. That is good to hear but there seems to be some kind of bug in the PCNS 3.1 because the host isn't shutting down. Here is the output, attached log

[BillP · Accepted solution]

This reply was originally posted by Dave on APC forums on 4/15/2014

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Hi,

In the debug output:

2014-04-15T13:12:05.821Z [FFD81B90 info 'Vmomi'] Throw vim.fault.RestrictedVersion

2014-04-15T13:12:05.821Z [FFD81B90 info 'Vmomi'] Result:

--> (vim.fault.RestrictedVersion) {

-->    dynamicType = ,

-->    faultCause = (vmodl.MethodFault) null,

-->    msg = "",

--> }

vim.fault.RestrictedVersion would indicate that the free version of ESXi host is being used.

The free version of ESXi cannot be commanded to shut down down using the VMware SDK API functions in PCNS.

The following Kbase provides intstructions for shutting down the free version of ESXi via SOAP - FA159768

If you are only managing 1 ESXi host then the PCNS 3.1 Virtual Appliance or vMA can be used instead of installing PCNS on a Windows Machine.

[rillo71_apc]

This was originally posted on APC forums on 4/16/2014

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After chaning the License key to a Enterprise Plus the host did a shutdown as expected! I guess that the required feature is "vSphere API" which is missing in the Standard Edition

[BillP]

This reply was originally posted by Dave on APC forums on 4/16/2014

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Will investigate further. It should be possible to access ESXi hosts via the API functions using Essentials, Standard and Enterprise Licensing. Read-only access to the API functions is provided for the free version.