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Any way to trigger a graceful shutdown within OpenManage SA when power goes out and UPS is running on battery?
I have a unique situation with a PE 2900. I'm using a CyberPower UPS, which has plenty of reserve power - at least 15 minutes. During a normal shutdown, the server takes about 3 minutes to shut down completely, since it is running Hyper-V (OS is 2008 R2).
I have the UPS software configured to power down the server after 5 minutes of running on battery power. However, the UPS itself shuts itself down after 2 minutes. I called CyberPower and this is hardcoded into their UPS/software, apparently. So - the net effect is that my server does not finish shutting down gracefully because the UPS shuts off early, even if it has 10 minutes of battery power to spare. They claim that in order to be able to configure when the UPS powers itself off, I need to spend another $400 for a business model UPS.
As a workaround, I'd like to set up an action to shut the server down gracefully using a batch file. The trick is, I need either an application event or some other mechanism to trigger it. The UPS software (unbelievably) does not log an event in the event log when it detects a power failure.
I've also tried removing the UPS software and using the OS battery critical shutdown feature. However, that shuts the server down in about 30 seconds (I found a bug on that issue from Server 2008, which apparently was not fixed). So, I can't use that method either, and since Hyper-V disables hibernation that is not an option either.
My Question: Is there a way within OpenManage SA to detect when the server is running on battery power, and execute an application (batch file)?
thanks for any help on this!
Anonymous
5 Practitioner
5 Practitioner
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274.2K Posts
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July 25th, 2011 09:00
Both your assumption and Dev Mngr reply is correct regarding the lack of options on the type of UPS that you currently process. Even after getting a proper UPS, there is still quite a bit involved in getting this setup to do precisely what you want as.
What’s needed:
1) Must have an intelligent UPS system that has the ability to send network alerts i.e. via SNMP.
2) Must have a management station that the alerts can be sent to. This management station must also have the appropriate software in place to assign tasks. Software for this would be something like DMC, SCCM/SCOM, etc.
3) The management station software must have ability to poll for status of the devices such as the UPS, Server, etc..
Once online, in order to perform the shutdown tasks, there are a few things that still need to be configured. Doing these steps will allow for the system to not be dependent solely upon the UPS
1) If the UPS detects a power interruption, then the UPS must send an alert to the management station.
2) The management station will need to understand the alert and correlate which devices are mapped to the UPS
3) The management station must then have a task that is triggered on the alert event to issue a graceful shutdown power command to the systems affected.
4) The UPS must have the ability to notify the management station or the management station can poll for a health status change. This way the management station can issue a power up command to bring the servers back up.
Dev Mgr
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July 24th, 2011 12:00
OpenManage was made to monitor Dell hardware. This may include Dell UPSes, but I doubt it would include CyberPower UPSes.
I'd suggest to upgrade to a business/server class UPS for your PowerEdge server (especially if you're running production VMs on hyper-v).
palacekeeper
18 Posts
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August 1st, 2011 11:00
I found and tested a simpler solution. I started exploring ways to do this with WMI queries. Conveniently, someone else already wrote a script (vbs and also powershell) for this scenario. It is called UPS Watcher and can be found here:
www.servercare.nl/.../Post.aspx
This script allows you to set the percentage of battery, time to wait, and a few other parameters. Worked well! Thanks for all the other feedback also - much appreciated.