PowerChute Business Edition - do you bother?

[BillP]

Way back in the day I use to use PowerChute for graceful shutdowns, but a long time ago there was a bad version that, if memory serves, prevented Windows server from booting? I can't remember the exact details but it screwed a lot of people over. Anyway, since that point I've never messed with the software. I have battery life of at least 2.5-3 hours and I only live 5 minutes from work so it just doesn't come up often that we have a long outage where I can't drive in and start shutting things down. This is a long-winded way of asking, do people still mess with the PowerChute software? For those wondering, the card in my APC isn't compatible with the network shutdown version so I'd have to use business edition. I hate adding junky software to my VM hosts, but maybe PowerChute is awesome now?

[BillP · Accepted solution]

Hi Thor,

Yeah a lot of people use PCBE but also some people use built in tools like Windows power settings or the Mac equivalent, it depends on their use case. Some of the main benefits of PCBE include:

• Scheduled shutdown
• Email alerting
• SNMP monitoring of non-networked UPSs via the PCBE agent
• The ability to run scripts at shutdown
  • This can be used to shutdown application that need services to be stopped in order or can be used to connect to remote systems that are not compatible with Powerchute.
• Outlet control
  • This is handy in that you can turn the ups/outlets off after the servers shutdown, once mains power is restored they can turn themselves on again and provided auto boot at AC recovery is enabled on your server they can boot themselves back up.

I would personally recommend using the serial port on your UPS to connect to the servers where possible but the USB will also work.

-Gavan