PCNS 3.1 Appliance Problems with ESXi 5.5U1 VM Status Detection and logon

[Anonymous user]

Hello,

we just deployed/upgraded to ESXi 5.5 U1 and rolled out the PCNS Appliance 3.1 (PowerChute Network Shutdown 3.1.0 Build 4844)

Vcenter is also the Vcenter Appliance.

We have 2 ESXi Host, ESX01 and ESX02. But I isolated 2 Problems or maybe Bugs?!

At the Beginning, we tested the shutdown of vm's and the Host's through the appliance and everything works fine.

1 Problem:

The Appliance now will(or try?, at least it reports) allways restart vm's on one Host, reporting "Attempting to power on VMs on Hostesx02.domain.localthat did not start." The Message appears every 5 minutes.

But all VM's on this Host are started. Even if i move all VM's to Host ESX01, this message appears,

Only when i remove ESX02 in the Host Protection Section of the Appliance, the Message disappears.

? : Could it be possible that the appliance have a list, and can't clear this list about "not started vm's" for this host  ?

Even after reboot of the appliance or the vcenter appliance, the Message won't disappear.

2 Problem:

I also detected logon erros on both esxi host in Task/event actions. Logon was setup with domain Admin logon ("Doamin\Administrator " for the vcenter Server in PCNS.

So i tried to setup the "pcnsadmin" (created the user as local User in Vcenter Appliance as well as in both esxi host (via ssh and setup the correct rights.

After change to this user in APC PCNS Appliance (vcenter logon section)

The Logon Error Messages disappears and as i remeber right, the Message above  "Attempting to power on VMs on Hostesx02.domain.localthat did not start"   started to reporting.

So I think, we do not get this message at beginning because of not correct Logon settings.

After this, I read the user guide again and registeterd the ESXi host in AD , created the Group ESX Admins and assign the AD Admins to this h. This was not done before. Then I switch back to AD Admin Logon in PCNS.

Logon now als works with Domain Admin without error Messsages.

"Problem": Now the Host report login from both User pcnsadmin and also from Domain Admin User.  ( User Domain\Administrator@192.168.1.25 logged in and pcnsadmin@192.168.1.25 logged in)

For me this is rather "unasthetic"

Did some else had these Problems?

[Anonymous user]

No One Idea's?

[BillP · Accepted solution]

Hi Supi,

For issue #1 did PCNS successfully start the VMs when the Hosts were powered on or where they re-started either manually or by HA? Could you check /opt/APC/PowerChute/group1/VirtualizationFileStore.properties file to see what VMs are marked for re-start? Are there any old entries in this file?

For issue #2 PCNS can only store 1 set of login credentials for vCenter Server and when the credentials are switched the old account should get logged out and there should be a login event for the new account? Can you provide some more detail of the login entries in the vCenter Log e.g. a screenshot - how often do the login events appear?

[Anonymous user]

Hello dgrehan,

that was the right hint:

/opt/APC/PowerChute/group1/VirtualizationFileStore.properties  had entry's for vm's. After i deleted them, the messages went away.

But why APC PCNS did't clean this list hinself?

The second question: because i was dealing with this i had 3 Backups of this PCNS-VM.  ( I restored an old one to be sure i didn't missconfigured something)

So i restored now the recent one , which has pcnsadmin as vcenter login.

After Clearing the properties file, changing to Domain\Admin for Vcenter-Login in PCNS and reboot i didnt see the duplicate login for these 2 accounts anymore. So I think the Problem is "solved".

[BillP]

The issue with PCNS sometimes not clearing entries from VirtualizationFileStore.properties will be addressed in the next release.

[Anonymous user]

@ dgrehan: Nice to know.