Simplivity OVC shutdown time

[wardspruytte]

Regarding the OVC shutdown times, my experience is that whenever the OVC's are running for quite some time (x weeks, months) without being restarted in the meantime, the shutdown takes a lot longer in controlled shutdown scenario.

I'm struggling to get APC Powerchute Network shutdown to shut all controllers down within the given timeframe. By Default Powerchute sets the shutdown time to 300sec and startup time to 480sec. Even after changing the 300sec to 480sec for shutdown time, in most cases it does not go well. 

In the recent past I've performed UPS tests using APC combined with Simplivity setups in both 2-node and 3-node clusters. In both situations, I've experienced issues whereas the shutdown is not being performed within the given time.

APC first performs a controlled shutdown of all VMs using the priority groups, where my vCenter is being shut together with the virtual Domain Controllers in the highest priority group, being last to go down. Then both OVC's are being shut by the APC software. vCenter is no longer available at that time, Arbiter is still connected. There is no option to shut vCenter down after the OVC's in my case.

In a 2-node cluster, one of the OVC's is taking way longer to shut down, if not both. 
In a 3-node cluster, one OVC was not shut down within the given time. 
Powerchute marks that ESXi host as failed to enter maintenance mode, and startup procedure is not performed correct.

adjusting the shutdown time to 20min might be a workaround, however I would like to point out that APC software is adding the startup time to the shutdown time by design, in order to get the complete shutdown time. This adds a whole lot of waiting time for the shutdown procedure and not all UPS devices are able to add this amount of extra time because of a limited runtime available.

Any other ways to have the OVC's shut down in a faster way? 

[gustenar]

I don't think there's a faster way of doing it. Even if you stop the svtfs@0 service manually and then issue a shutdown command it will take the same amount of time as a shutdown via CLI or vCenter most likely, as that's what the clean shutdown methods do anyway.