PCNS 4.0 behaviour in Multiple vSphere HA Clusters

[BillP]

Hi All

I'm implementing HA in an existing environments and working through the PowerChuteTM Network Shutdown v4.0 User Guide. 

In the HA section of the guide it says

"VMware setups with multiple Clusters or Datacenters,

If PowerChute is deployed as a virtual appliance we recommend deploying one PowerChute Agent per cluster if your setup has multiple clusters."

I'm trying to figure out why this is needed. If you had 3 clusters and only 1 of those clusters has a PowerChute Agent, how would the other two be effected?

I'm not asking to be akward, I have an unusual setup and what to know if not having one PowerChute agent per cluster will have a negative effect. 

Thanks in advance for your help 🙂

[BillP]

Hi,

On 7/9/2015 11:01 AM, Noel said:

If PowerChute is deployed as a virtual appliance we recommend deploying one PowerChute Agent per cluster if your setup has multiple clusters."

I'm trying to figure out why this is needed. If you had 3 clusters and only 1 of those clusters has a PowerChute Agent, how would the other two be effected?

If the PowerChute Agent is configured to protect the 3 clusters and it is off line due to an issue at its site the other 2 would be affected. They would have no protection making them vulnerable to a crash due to single point of failure.

[BillP]

Thank you Bill for taking the time to reply. So the recommendation in docs is just for redundancy. If there was say 1 pcns agent in a single datacenter with say 2 clusters and all communications were fine, there should be no limitation on that pcns agent being able to shut down the two clusters. 

The reason i ask, is the docs sound like the pcns vapp only has the ability to shutdown the hosts and vms in its own cluster.

[BillP]

Noel,

As long as the cluster is managed by the vCenter Server PCNS is registered with PCNS will recognize it and can shut it down.

[BillP · Accepted solution]

Hi Bill

Thank you very much for taking the time to help, much appreciated, 

Noel/