Why should an ESXi host go into maintenance mode?

[Anonymous user]

Hi,

I've been reading some forum posts on Powerchute and the shutdown procedure and learned that the first step the powerchute software does, is bring the hosts in maintenance mode. For some of your customers this causes a lot of unwanted VMotions because of DRS being enabled. Your suggestions is to disable DRS. Why not make it an option to first shutdown all VMs and then enter the hosts in maintenance mode?

For bigger environments where hosts are spread over multiple APC's, I can understand that you're going for maintenance mode first, hoping that some hosts in the same cluster are on a different APC which has no power failure and then move all VMs to those hosts. 

But smaller environments that only have on APC to protect that hosts are better of with a shutdown of the VMs first and then triggering maintenance mode. 

With the option to move maintenance mode into first or second place, you would make all types of install happy.

How about in the next release???? 🙂 🙂 🙂

[BillP]

Thank you Gabrie for your comments and suggestion. I will let our Software Development team know about this.

[BillP]

Hi,

The scenario you described occurs when DRS Automation Level is set to Fully Automated. The reasoning behind starting the maintenance mode task when a shutdown sequence occurs is to prevent VMs from being migrated to an affected host.

If PCNS does do this then there is a chance that DRS could migrate a VM to a host during or after the VM shutdown step - this would lead to the VM not being gracefully shut down. To avoid unnecessary vMotions we recommend setting the DRS Automation level to Partially automated (as opposed to disabling it completely).

[Anonymous user]

Why not have PowerChute record the current DRS setting, then change DRS to partially automated and perform the steps. And after the environment starts running again, PowerChute only needs to change the DRS setting back to the original setting.

We have too many client environments where we really need fully automated DRS. 

[BillP]

Hi,

We'll look at it for a future release.

[BillP · Accepted solution]

Hi Bill

Love the sound of this feature for my large customer.  Did / will it get implemented?

Regards

Ed