PCNS appliance cannot login to hosts

[Anonymous user]

Hello everyone,

We recently deployed a PCNS aplliance (4.2) to a vsphere 6.0 environment with 2 hosts and everything seems to be working OK (VM shutdown, host protection, etc.).

Still there seems to be an issue as PCNS tries to login not only to the vcenter (which works fine as seen in the bottom line in my screenshot) but also to the hosts using the same credentials which fails.

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The user has the Administrator role on both hosts and can be used otherwise to login (e.g. vsphere-client).

To be honest I don't know why PCNS is even trying to login to the hosts directly.

Can anyone help?

[BillP]

Hi,

The shutdown process is as follows 

1. PowerChute reports that the UPS is on battery.

2. Shutdown delay for the On Battery event elapses. PowerChute starts a maintenance mode task on each Host. At the same time it sends a command to turn off the UPS or Outlet Group.

3. PowerChute starts VM shutdown followed by vApp shutdown.

4. VM/vApp shutdown durations elapse and PowerChute gracefully shuts down the vCenter Server VM.

5. vCenter VM shutdown duration elapses.

6. PowerChute starts executing the shutdown command file. - VM & vApp Shutdown enabled with a 120 second delay (i.e. 120 seconds allocated for each action to complete). - The option to turn off the UPS or Outlet Group is enabled. - A shutdown command file has been configured with a 120 second duration. When a critical UPS event, such as UPS on Battery occurs, the following sequence is triggered:

7. Shutdown command file duration elapses. PowerChute shuts down the VMware hosts using the order on the VMware Host Protection page. (The host running the vCenter VM will be shut down last in this scenario).

8. OS shutdown sequence starts on the PowerChute physical machine.

9. After a 70 second delay the OS starts to shut down.

10. UPS waits for greater of Low Battery Duration/Maximum Required Delay (NonOutlet Aware UPS‟s) or the Outlet Group Power Off Delay (initiated during step 2).

11. UPS turns off after the user-configurable Shutdown Delay time has elapsed or the Outlet Group turns off after the power off Delay elapses.

During step 7 PCNS contacts the host to power them down using the credentials it uses to communicate with vCenter. The credentials are case sensitive so it is possible that is causing the login error. See FAQ FA349917

[Anonymous user]

I've the same issue... the problem is that, with shared account, vCenter 6.5 needs to login with user@vsphere.local and both esxi host need to login only with user, without domain. I don't have any ideas at the moment... Do you have any suggestion?

Thanks

Dario

[BillP · Accepted solution]

Hi,

When connecting directly to ESXi hosts PowerChute just uses user as the account name since ESXi will not allow @vsphere.local for a username.