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fpineau
Contributor
Contributor

Power outage, auto-shutdown and UPS

After wrestling with this for a week now, I'm just flabbergasted that this issue seems to be so poorly handled and poorly documented, so I'm hoping someone can help me out here.

I have a very simple situation.  I have several hosts on a single APC UPS (with a network card).  All I want to do is have my ESXi hosts either pause or shut down the VMs and then shut themselves down in the event of a power outage.  There seems to be no way to do this that isn't an incredibly-convoluted mass of scripts and extra servers.

Here is what I have so far, which is the best I've been able to come up with after extensive reading:

Running a VMW management appliance with APC PowerChute Network Shutdown, which is connected to the UPS for power monitoring.  I've got the VMA and PCNS running and it does talk to the UPS.  In theory, it can execute a shutdown command to the ESXi hosts, although the process for doing so is not documented.  There is also no way for me to have ESXi tell the VMs how to behave before the host shuts down (whether I want them to shut down or just suspend).

"Sure, there is!", you say.  "Just go into Host Configuration and set Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown paramters!"  Oh, no no no, my friend.  We're using HA.  In 5.0, HA causes those settings to be disabled, because apparently VMWare assumes that in an HA environment, there's no possible way you would ever have a power outage.  Why, if a host goes down, we'll just bring the guest up on another host!  Ah, but what if ALL my hosts go down?  I can't find anywhere that documents the behavior of an HA system in the event of a power outage-induced graceful host shutdown.

I don't particularly care if the VMs (or even the hosts) come back up automatically after an outage.  I'm FAR more concerned about getting them shut down gracefully.  I could point PCNS to each of my guest servers and hope for the best, but ESXi is already perfectly capable of handling it, so why isn't there a "UPS/Power Management" feature included?  Why can't vCenter or the hosts monitor my UPS and shut down my servers?  Even worse, if you are using something other than an APC UPS (with no PCNS), like an HP UPS with a serial port, there's no management at all!

What piece of this puzzle am I missing?  Why is this so unnecessarily complicated?

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