VMware, battery backup and restart

[denisl]

Hi All -
I've had a couple of power outages which crashed my Supermicro server running ESXi so I decided to add a cyberpower battery backup. The cyberpower software will allow me to initiate an orderly shutdown of all VM's if the power goes out. Hopefully there's a delay I can configure in the bbu software so a shutdown isn't initiated for short power interruptions. anyway.. what I'm trying to figure out is how do I automate the restart of the system?

I don't think the BBU software will actually shutdown my Supermicro server, just the VM's - so my ESXi server will eventually crash once power is no longer available. Is there any risk of corruption of my VMFS volumes if all the VM's are powered off and the system power is gone? If not then I can just allow my server to crash and once power is restored the supermicro will automatically boot ESXi and I will setup an autostart policy for my VM's.

However - if I have to shutdown my ESXi host as well then I'm not sure how I could automate the restart of the supermicro server. Any thoughts on this? For example, what if power is lost for 10 minutes and everything is shutdown in an orderly manner (VM's and physical host) - then power comes back - all the while power is never lost because of the batter backup? How do I reboot from a clean shutdown?

I'm guessing this capability would have to exist at the cyberpower bbu level...

Hoping someone has worked through this scenario already and can give me some pointers. Thanks

 

[denisl]

I found my answer... Looks like once everything is shutdown orderly the cyberpower bbu will kill power to the server.

Power Restore When a utility power failure occurs, PowerPanel® Business Edition software may order the computer to shut down and power off after the specified remaining runtime is met or if the battery capacity is low. After the utility power is restored the UPS turns on automatically and supplies power to the computer. If the computer BIOS is set to boot when power is restored the computer will automatically restart

 

[Rhinox]

I do not think it is the right way to shutdown ESXi-server (just simply to kill power). It is not clean shutdown, even if ESXi is basically running from memory. Config-files, stats, logs, etc are not saved and closed properly.

Proper ESXi shutdown is either to use VM to call ESXi and initiate delayed shutdown (as i.e. is APC's PowerChute doing), or install UPS-client on ESXi server (i.e. NUT) and let it communicate with server.

 

[mrkrad]

Vcenter with apc's linux vm will shutdown the servers in order and then shutdown the esxi host before pulling power (in theory). You don't want an unclean vmdk when the power is restored!