UPS and shutdown management under HP ESXi 4 on ML350 G6

[Nick Walton]

Hi,

I am planning a "one box" VMWare project using the HP custom ESXi 4 running on a new Proliant ML350 G6. I have an HP T1500 G3 UPS unit to provide battery backup but can find no information about how to set up management of virtual machine shutdowns in an ESXi environment.

Is there any HP Power Management built into the HP custom ESXi 4 hypervisor?

Can the T1500 UPS take a network card upgrade to talk over Ethernet?

What is good practice in this area when I will be running 4 virtual machines on ESXi but have no other management server running?

Thanks in advance for your help,

Nick.

[Mark Aggleton]

Nick

Did you ever resolve this - I'm in a situation where I'm deploying exactly the same config (well, 5 guests actually) into 160 locations...

Mark

[Nick Walton]

Mark,

I never got any response here as you can see. However, I did get to have a pre-sales technical support conversation with someone at VMWare themselves about this. They said that UPS on a VMWare host was really only about alerting someone to take action. That is because it is just too complicated a scenario when you have a bunch of guest operating systems which need to be shut down and then started up when power is restored. When I sat down and wrote out what I wanted to happen in the event of power outage then I concluded the same: too complicated.

So, I have installed my host which is powered by the UPS T1500. I have not bothered to connect its USB at all.

Sorry not to offer anything useful and sophisticated but I have concluded that the VMWare folks are right: keep it simple.

Nick.

[Mark Aggleton]

Nick

Thanks for that. Obviously using UPSs with NICs was going to work out ridiculously expensive over that number of sites...

Well, at least we'll get protection from spikes.

Marl