HP Power Manager Woes

[Brian W. Spolarich]

I have two racks of systems with R3000 UPS units.

I have designated one server in each rack (both HP Proliant servers) as the one running HP Power Manager (4.1 build 8), and the rest run the agents.

I'm having trouble with both of the "Power Manager Server" systems. Both are running Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2. One runs Exchange, the other is a file/print server.

In both cases:

- HP Power Manager (DevManBE.exe) when running for a long time exhibits memory leak behaviour and the process memory size grows to be quite large (500MB+).
- Restarting Power Manager service causes the UPS to no longer be detected (Event 16: "Failed to connect to device"). Rerunning the configuration wizard doesn't help.
- Power Manager service sometimes fails to start with a "Service did not respond to the control in a timely fashion." error.
- PortMon (the Microsoft/Sysinternals tool) isn't helpful -- it says the port is in use, but doesn't show any useful activity or processes attached to the port.

Basically this tool is unusable at least in my environment. Are there other UPS monitoring tools that will talk to the HP UPS and shut remote systems down in a controlled fashion when the UPS is out of power?

Rebooting will presumably fix the probl

[Chris Rosan]

Is there a newer version of the software you can run?

Have you contacted HP support and reported the memory leak and the other problems?

Rather than "restarting" the service, try stopping it for 30 seconds and then starting it again. I've found that you need to do this with some services as although you've "stopped" them, there are still remnants of the service loaded/running somewhere.

[Rody Klop]

Same probleem here.
There is a problem with some 360/380 G5 series and il02 CLI and console support.

You have to disable console, virtual and EMS port , only the embedded port must be enabled
in the Bios (press F9 at boot bios) and later F8 for the ilo2 settings, disable CLI here.

If these settings stayed on too long your Serial port may be damaged.

Tried this one, but still have same problem also a full remove and reinstall does not cure the problem. Perhaps back to registry edit again.....

The software is pretty limited by the way. I does the job (if it works) barely

[Chris Rosan]

Have you tried using the default windows UPS service rather than the HP one?

[Rody Klop]

No did not have he time to configure the UPS Windows service manually

Did use APC Business Manager but no detection.

[Brian W. Spolarich]

I need to be able to shut down an entire rack of servers when only one of them is serially connected to the UPS. I'm guessing the Windows UPS tool won't do that for me.

I'm going to check out the BIOS settings as suggested and see if there's something there. It would be rather screwed up if I can damage my server's serial port by running it as it comes configured out of the box so I'm somewhat dubious of this claim.

HP claims it is getting more into the software business, but I find that many of these system management tools frankly suck.

[Rody Klop]

Normally if Power Manager would have worked, it can do this for you is you use the agents.

APC has some nice solutions, and they work for sure.

But the customer choose HP because of the reliability. Today I opened a HP Case with Support, so they can fix this and think of a mind bubbling solution

[Brian W. Spolarich]

Can one use APC software stuff with HP UPSes?

[Rody Klop]

Although HP uses APC Hardware. APC ships it with OEM codes, so also modified firmware.
I tried it, but no luck with R3000XR UPS.

Other UPS'ses from HP I do not know...but worth to try because the APC software I found it very stable.

[Rody Klop]

Found old thread:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1073163

Same problem only windows 2000 and old version Power Manager, but same result.