Setting up PSNS Virtual Appliance with 3 hosts and vCenter

[Anonymous user]

Hello,

I have been reading through the documentation and also the forums postings on properly setting this up. I am still a tad bit unclear on a few items and was hoping someone could better clarify a couple of items.

We have 1 UPS, 3 VMware Hosts with vCenter, The vCenter Server is a VM on one of the VMware Hosts.

Does the PowerChute Network Shutdown Virtual Appliance get installed on our SAN or on the local storage on one of the host servers? I'm thinking on the SAN but curious what if a host goes down and vMotion occurs?

How do i prevent the PSNS from being shutdown until the very end? I just want to be sure that it is able to shutdown all of the VM's and hosts in the proper sequence. Does this seem right for the shutdown order?

1. VM's

2. vCenter Server

3. Host 1, Host 2 then Host 3?

I am a little new to this so please let me know if something isn't clear or does make sense.

Thank you,

Steve

[BillP · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I recommend installing to the SAN. If the PCNS appliance gets vMotioned it will still perform properly.

The shutdown process is, PowerChute places the VMware hosts into Maintenance mode and starts to shut down VMs and vApps. After the VM/vApp delay, PowerChute shuts down vCenter. After the vCenter shutdown delay PowerChute shuts down the hosts and the PowerChute appliance is shut down. The host running vCenter is shutdown second to last before the host running PowerChute. At this time PowerChute does not offer the ability to set shutdown order. So in your configuration of you want host 3 to go down last install PCNS appliance on it and install vCenter on host 2.

[Anonymous user]

Hi Bill and thank you for the information!

So if PowerChute puts the hosts in maintenance mode, how do we control the shutdown of VM's so the host doesn't perform a "hard" shutdown? Or control the shutdown order of the VM's?

[BillP]

Hi,

You need to make sure that you have VMWare tools on all the VM's for a graceful shutdown of the VM's.  If you don't have VMWare tools installed, your VM's will have a hard shutdown. 

If you want to control the order in which VM's are shutdown, you can use vApps for this functionality. This is the only way we can order the sequence of VM's for shutdown.

On page 18 on the below manual it shows how to implement vApps:

http://www.apcmedia.com/salestools/PMAR-9DNLQK/PMAR-9DNLQK_R0_EN.pdf

Regards,

B

[Anonymous user]

Thank you both for the information! I really appreciate it!