UPS & ESX - HA/shutdown Question

[davecon]

Hi

I have a question regarding UPS shutdown and HA on ESX 3.02

We have 6 ESX hosts, all running Production VM's from a SAN. The system is powered through an APC Symmetra unit.

I have managed to Install APC's Powerchute network shutdown on all ESX host and it seems to be running fine. At the moment i cannot fully test UPS shutdowns as the system is in use.

I will be able to test and run through shutdown/power failure scenarios in the next few weeks, but i would like to know if anyone has set this up and what solutions you have used?

If I set each host to shutdown using PCNS, will the HA start migrating VM's if one host shuts down faster than another? This could get very messy if the hosts shutdown at different times.

In this case, would i be better off using the Powerchute software inside each VM, and then waiting for all VM's to go down before the ESX hosts are shutdown?

I have seen people using scipts etc.. but I am not confident enough in Linux scripting to trust everything to work!

Ideally, i would like to be able to just shutdown each host, and not have to do anything inside the VM's. In this case, the ESX host would get a shutdown signal from the UPS, then cleanly shutdown each VM and the power off the host.

Has anyone set this up (and tested) without having to spend days creating and testing scripts?

Any help/info would be much appreciated! Thanks.

[depping]

HA will not kick in, and neither will DRS. the APC tool does a commandline shutdown of the VM's and than shuts down the ESX host.In otherwords if you use the default APC tools you don't need to change anything inside the VM, it will work out of the box.

Stefan wrote a nice howto about the installation and configuration: http://www.stefanschuller.com/index.php/2007/10/06/guide-how-to-setup-apc-powerchute-network-shutdow...

besure to enable the startup of the vm's when the esx hosts are booted via the config tab Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown

Duncan

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[davecon]

Thank you

Just regarding the Startup/Shutdown settings...

I will set VM to automatic startup. In the 'Shutdown Action' option - what is the difference between 'Guest Shutdown' and 'Power off'. I assume 'guest shutdown' will cleanly shutdown the VM from within windows, and Power off will force a shutdown?

What happens if the VM (windows 2k3) hangs or fails to shutdown, will the host force it down? Is the 'shutdown delay' the wait time for the VM shut down?

Apologies for all the questions- I am just trying to get a better understanding of all the options (difficult without being able to 'play' with settings in a production environment!)

thanks again.

[depping]

power off is like pulling the cord. but APC does this via the command line and probably with the "trysoft" parameter. In other words, it will try to shut it down cleanly, but if that fails it will just pull the cord.and the shutdown delay, and someone correct me if i'm wrong is the period of time between that vm and before the next is being shutdown.

Duncan

My virtualisation blog:

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

[v-4-virtual]

Interesting thread.. this helped thank you guys.

I had a situation as below :

A cluster of 3 ESX 4.1 in a data center and each data center has its own UPS

The requirement was to turn off HA first, smoot powerdown VMs and then power down host.

/etc/opt/init.d/vmware-aam shutdown ; vmware-cmd -l | while read i ; do vmware-cmd $i stop trysoft && /sbin/shutdown -hP now ; done

I run this and seen working well for me and on one of my customers machine.

Disclaimer : written as hobby neither VMware nor I are responsible for if any damages caused.

Hope it helps

[v-4-virtual]

Useful link :

Clean Shutdown of Virtual Machines using PowerChute Network Shutdown in a HA Cluster Environment

http://nam-en.apc.com/ci/fattach/get/1063516//session/L2F2LzEvdGltZS8xMzQwMzgyMzk4L3NpZC9yYUFNdGpfaw...