Shutdown Configuration Question

[Anonymous user]

OK I would like to start off by saying I am fairly new to the UPS game. I have been asked by my employer to configure an existing UPS system to make sure that the servers shut down after being on battery power in the event of a power failure and come back up when power is restored.

Here are the details on the system:

UPS:
Smart-UPS RT 10000 RM XL

Clients: 8 Servers
PowerChute Network Shutdown 2.2.3

I have the clients and UPS configured and am confident that the system will shutdown after 10 minutes of battery power and come back up if the battery of the UPS completly drains.

The issue I am having is what happens if the power is down for 15 minutes (all servers shut down after 10) and comes back on before the battery of the UPS completly runs out (37 Minutes for this config) does the UPS bring the servers back up?

The reason I am asking this question is I have been reading on the proceedure as I was curious how the UPS actually powers the servers back up and I understand that it relies on the BIOS of the server to power the servers back on. I believe the setting is something similar to "power server back on when power is restored after being down".

In the problem scenario the power will go out and the servers will begin powering down after 10 minutes of being on battery power. In about 20 minutes all servers have received the shut down command from the UPS and are sitting on the "It's now safe to turn off your computer" screen waiting for the power to be cut so they will be able to reboot themselves. The say the power goes up 1 minute later before the battery of the UPS completly drains. How do the servers know to restart themselves?

The reason why I was asked to do the shutdown at 10 minutes of battery power was a business critical server requires about 20 minutes to power down. I realise that if I increased the amount of time the servers were on battery power before they reset I would decrease the probability of this actually happening.

I am thinking there must be a way around this issue or I am understanding something incorectly. I did speak with somebody at APC and was told that there wasn't a solution for this and I should buy a metered PDU to login remotly and reset the power on the servers to get them off of the "It's now safe to turn off your computer" and booted up.

I would really appreciate any insight or suggestions. And sorry about the lengthy post this was difficult for me to explain.

[TheNotoriousKMP_apc · Accepted solution]

APC Tech Support was spot on.

You would need a Switched Rack (for full individual outlet control) to turn all of the servers back on individually in the event that input power is restored prior to having the UPS run out of battery runtime.

The only solution to this is to configure the very last server shutting down to also shutdown the UPS when its own shutdown is complete. This will ensure that in the event of line power being restored to the UPS, that the UPS awakes from Sleep Mode and powers everything back up.