Outlet Group Power Off Delay issue

[Anonymous user]

Hello,

I'm using PCNS v4 on ESXi/vCenter with an AP9630 NMC on the latest firmware.  In PCNS, I have the shutdown settings set to "Turn off the UPS".  The PCNS server is registered to Outlet Group 0 (Main outlet group).  I'm getting a 960 second delay for the UPS to shut down, and I've narrawoed this down to the Power Off Delay for Outlet Group 0 on the NMC.  I've tried reducing this value, but it seems to be pulling from PCNS somewhere, and it always resets to 960 seconds.

I've found that 540 of those seconds are linked to the virtualization shutdown settings in PCNS (I have 300 seconds for virtual machines and 240 seconds for vCenter).  This makes sense to me, and if I set both of these to 0, I can get the Power Off Delay for the outlet group down to 420 seconds.  I just can't find out where it's grabbing those extra 420 seconds from.

I've tried checking/unchecking the box for "force negotiation" in the NMC, but this box always resets to unchecked.

Any advice on this?  Given I have the shutdown settings set to turn off the UPS instead of the outlet groups, I'm not sure why it's even using the outlet group delay settings, but my shutdown currently looks like this (the only shutdown event I have configured is "Runtime remaining below threshold" for 1200 seconds):

1. Once there is 1200 seconds of runtime remaining, PCNS starts shutting down my VM's
2. After 300 seconds (the vm shutdown delay), PCNS appears to issue a host shutdown, which shuts down vCenter and the vMA in which PCNS is installed.  At this time, the UPS starts the 960 second countdown defined in the outlet group (before I set Outlet Group 1 to 0 seconds of shutdown, it would start counting down from this group first)
3. Host shuts off gracefully, and the outlet group shutdown continues.  At 0 it finally shuts down the UPS.

Thanks for any help!

[BillP]

The outlet off delay includes

VM and vApp shutdown delays

VM and vApp start up delays

vCenter power down delay

Built in 70 second delay rounded to 2 minutes (none configurable)

PCNS shutdown process is discussed start on page 64 of the User's Guide and in Application Note 180.

Note: The start up delay is included so that if the sysems is in the process of starting up and there is an outage the systems will have enough time to start and power down properly.

[Anonymous user · Accepted solution]

Thank you Bill, I completely missed this from the manual and it makes total sense.  Just confirmed via my setup.

-Paul