15 Responses

  1. Mike from laser dist
    Mike from laser dist at |

    Here’s a tip: You don’t NEED to change anything when you do an ESX 4.1 to ESXi 5 upgrade. I know that sounds crazy, but when you pop in the install CD for ESXi 5, it will ask if you want to preserve your ESX 4.1 settings. And it actually works.

    Reply
    1. @vcdxnz001
      @vcdxnz001 at |

      Hi Mike. It will actually work (although some settings from 4.1 are not taken across). But this assumes that the existing settings are optimal and the best for vSphere 5, which in many cases they won't be. vSphere HA is one of the most miss-configured features of vSphere.

      Reply
  2. Alastair
    Alastair at |

    My data-shed also shares a circuit breaker with the kitchen.

    I've trained my wife and daughters to reset the breaker when the kettle stops working

    Reply
  3. Ben Loveday
    Ben Loveday at |

    Heh, good story dude, we've done a lot around integrating various UPS vendors and shutdown commands to vsphere, whether it be full ESX or ESXi and the vMA. Let me know if you need any info 🙂

    Reply
    1. @vcdxnz001
      @vcdxnz001 at |

      Hi Ben, Anything on Dell UPS's and APC for vSphere 5 would be great. I used to run the APC Auto Shutdown software for vSphere 4. But I don't know if they've updated it.

      Reply
  4. Auto Start Breaks in 5.0 Update 1 – Not Just Free vSphere Hypervisor Version « Long White Virtual Clouds

    […] Perhaps this is a bit of a legacy that is now probably not needed with the changes to VMware HA in vSphere 5? The reason I say it’s a bit of a legacy is that in previous versions of vSphere HA would not record the power state of each VM and power everything back on when the hosts boot up in the case of a complete power outage. In vSphere 5 this is exactly what happens. You can find out more by reading my article vSphere 5 HA Complete Failure Experience. […]

  5. David
    David at |

    We are currently using Dell UPS to shutdown 2 Esxi 5 Hosts and 1 Vcenter Server and it's working great. The only thing you need are VMA on the Esxi hosts and configure auto shutdown of the VMA followed by the other Virtual Machines when there is a power cut. Works a treat.

    Reply
  6. David
    David at |

    ooops forgot that the dell Ups local node manager has to be installed on the esxi hosts as well.

    Reply
    1. @vcdxnz001
      @vcdxnz001 at |

      Thanks David. I'll give that a try. I have made my power supply more diverse now and am running it off two circuits so it's much less likely to fail just because my wife is cooking in the kitchen :). The next failure scenario regarding my kids pushing the power buttons in turn is a little harder to solve without some more physical security. I will definitely give the Dell UPS Local Node Manager a shot though.

      Reply
  7. Chuck
    Chuck at |

    What I'm confused about, and experiencing in a newly implemented VM environment with an HP P4000 VSA, is that the VSA host powers on after a full power failure, but as designed it stops at the login prompt of the SAN/iQ software, awaiting the START command, and thereby the vSAN is not available, so my VM's fail to start even though VMWare ESXi 5 is remembering which hosts were running so it restarts them. Where have we gone wrong?

    Reply
    1. @vcdxnz001
      @vcdxnz001 at |

      Hi Chuck, As Ben mentioned that is expected. But the SAN/iQ Software is still running even though only the prompt is displayed. There is no need to issue the start command. You will most likely need to rescan the datastores, and if the VSA's are on a Distributed Switch you will likely have to restart the management agents on the host. The problem is that the storage would not have been available when the host booted.

      Reply
  8. Ben Loveday
    Ben Loveday at |

    Hi Chuck,

    That is normal behaviour for the VSA. The console is used for performing initial configuration tasks and resetting the management group and passwords. You'll probably find that it is because your VSA hasnt started in time for the host to see the iSCSI datastores as being available. We had similar issues and found that a manual rescan of the iSCSI adapter brought everything into life. I suppose you'd need to put a restart priority on the VSA and delay the remaining VM's…possibly doing a HBA rescan scripted from a vMA. Anyway, I hope this helps.

    Cheers,

    Ben

    Reply
  9. djsdjs
    djsdjs at |

    So maybe you have an idea on this. I have a vm I want to have come back up automatically, always. Its in HA and that’s all good except when there is a power outage and the ups gracefully shuts things down. HA sees its state as shutdown and it won’t start if there is a host still up and it won’t start when the power comes back on as of 5.0u1.

    I supposed I could hack together a script to check its state periodically and restart it if it is shutdown, but that seems inelegant with all this fancy ha hanging about.

    Am I missing a setting some where?

    Reply
    1. @vcdxnz001
      @vcdxnz001 at |

      There is a bit of a gap there at the moment. Scripting is one way of solving it, but you'd have to have another system handle bringing it back up. The other option is to have the UPS not shut down that particular VM and then HA will automatically power it back up when everything comes back to life. To protect the application and data integrity you'd want to get the OS to not power off the VM when the OS has shut itself down, so basically a halt. So you might have to disable or remove the advanced power management from the OS, or tweak some advanced settings. I've described the situation with 5.0 U1 in my article about Auto Start being broken. You can refer to http://longwhiteclouds.com/2012/03/28/auto-start-….

      Reply
  10. RichM
    RichM at |

    Wow, and I just learned something I didn't know. Thanks.

    Reply

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