ESXi and HP UPS Management

[preecep]

We have a combination of physical and virtual servers. With exception to a couple of ESXi 4 hosts, all servers are running Windows 2003 or 2008. We also have some HP R5500 UPSs which have the network management modules installed. The Windows servers have a HP UPS Power Management Agent (HPPM agent) installed which allows the UPSs to gracefully shutdown these servers in the event of a power outage. We'd like to configure the UPSs to also manage the ESXi hosts too but so far have we have been unsuccessful.

We tried following this out-dated HP guide but couldn’t get the HPPM Linux agents installed on the ESXi hosts.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00656921/c00656921.pdf?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

Has anyone managed to do this or could point is in the right direction? Any advice or suggestions would be gratefully appreicated.

[Josh26]

Hi,

The important thing is getting individual VMs shutdown. Your windows agents should cater for that.

I don't believe you can get any such agent installed on ESXi. The process used by APC Powerchute is that you have a VM with a shutdown script that actually requests the shutdown of the host. You can do this from the rCLI or on a VMA.

[Jeroen Demets]

The big advantage of having the UPS management card instruct the ESX servers to shutdown is that there is no single point of failure in this (other than the UPS itself). By using the vMA or whatever software in between, it means that there won't be any graceful shutdown if that management piece is unavailable. Sure it runs virtual but even then...

By going to ESXi (even with vSphere 5) we are putting some steps backwards in terms of UPS usage. VMware seems te live in a world where there are no UPS'es but our customers use them. Our customers demand that VM's are being shutdown gracefully, and also very important, get started automatically after the power outage.

VMware HA doesn't work with this as gracefully shutdowned VM's won't get started up, so you need to use scripts.

To be honest, I wish VMware either kept ESX or pushed/helped the UPS vendors like APC and HP to build good working agents on ESXi.

:smileysad: