ESXI 5.5 and APC SmartUPS 1500 - Shutdown Procedure

rosco

Gawd
Joined
Jun 22, 2000
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I currently have our ESXI 5.5 running on a Dell poweredge server. It's connected to a APC Smart UPS 1500. I want to figure out the best way to manage shutting down the virtual machines and then ESXI when there is an power outage.

I have a ubuntu vm and a windows server 2012 vm.

Thanks.
 
I would say to look in to the PowerChute Network Shutdown v4.0 or v4.1 client. It's a VM from APC that runs on ESXi to do exactly what you want. The only piece you might have to get is the network card for your APC Smart UPS 1500 so the unit can be on the network.
Then just have all of your VMs running VMWare Tools and when a power outage hits, PowerChute tells ESXi to power down which gracefully shuts down your VMs before turning off the server itself.

I have my APC unit even set to turn off shortly after the server. This way, even when I am not home and a power outage hits, everything gracefully shuts down, APC unit turns off and it's done. Power restored, the unit waits a couple minutes before powering up and then the server powers up when it detects energy and all my VMs start shortly after that.
 
You can do it with USB also if you use apcupsd instead of powerchute. Pass USB through to a guest, setup apcupsd and have it ssh into the esxi host when the battery gets low and execute a shutdown command. Lots of writeups on google. You can do it from windows as well using plink to ssh into the esxi box.
 
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