best practice - shutdown daily or continuous running w/periodic reboots

[Jonathan Wegner]

I have a network of about 20 HP-Tac-4 J210/9000 machines that are used as workstations for a military simulation. The machines are about 5 yrs old and are being replaced with Dell PC's and aren't being serviced anymore. I live in an area where bad power prevails and power spikes can occur at anytime, and they get worse during lightning storms. All of my machines are powered through a Universal Power Supply.

Ok, now that you know the background, here is my question. Is it better to shutdown the machines daily (power off) and power them back on the next day, or is it safe to leave them running and reboot when needed to fix system problems.

This has been a point of contention between my site manager and I. He is of the mind that we need to shut the machines down nightly, esp now that they aren't being serviced anymore to save the power supplies. My point of view is that shutting them down is harder on the equipment than leaving them on and risking the power spikes.

What is your opinion?

Thanks,
Jonathan

[harry d brown jr]

Jonathan,

The more you shutdown and power off, the more failures you will have, BUT with your current power issues, I'd almost agree that you should shut them down. Even when you replace them with Dell PC's you are going to have issues. Monies would be better spent on fixing the power issues.

live free or die
harry

[Krishna Prasad]

You should never have to shutdown any Unix box. They should run, and run and run.

They only reason I could see to shut them down nightly might be for security. I take it they are workstations?

[Roger Baptiste]

hi,

Powering off the system frequently is not an good option. But that is in a world where power is guaranteed.

Your situation seems to be different. If the chances of power going off daily in the night is high, then i would prefer powering off the system every night, rather than let the UPS get into support mode and shutdown the system.

HTh
raj

[John Payne_2]

What is the sutuation with the UPS's? Do you have the machines set up to shutdown clean on a power fail? What is your runtime on the UPS, ie is it even long enough to shutdown? It sounds like you are not a 24x7 shop, so I'm guessing there are no operators or anyone close that can come during an outage and shutdown clean...

If you can get the machines down before the UPS dies, either manual or automatically, then do that and leave them up. Otherwise, with no maintainence, you may have too much risk involved to leave them up. (Maybe shutdown during the threat of bad weather, etc?)

Hope it helps

John

[Jonathan Wegner]

Just a clarification statement here:
The power here isn't really bad, just somewhat unstable. Spikes aren't the norm, but they do happen more than in other places I would say. Also, this is on a military installation where random power outages tend to happen more often than in other places. In the event of a storm coming in I take no chances and shut everything down asap. But the rest of the time aren't the UPS enough of a safeguard?

Yes, the machines are workstations. I have 5 machines which are the server and slave processors for the simulation, the rest of the machines are simple terminals for the simulation.

As mentioned before, each machine is powered through an UPS, whether it be one UPS to a machine or 3 or 4 machines on a heavy duty UPS.

[Jon Mattatall]

If your UPS has ample capacity (extended running time, generator backup, inverters, etc) then I'd vote for leaving them up on a continuous basis.

We've had to do several shutdowns here while our UPS was being replaced / upgraded, and the toll of failed disks was terrible.
Not a huge problems for RAID arrays, but losing an internal drive is a drag. Reboots are hard on the machinery.

If your UPS is just to give you a chance to shut things down gracefully, then yes, nightly shutdowns may be the best choice. I'm assuming no one is available to shut them down in case of an early AM failure.

Jon

[John Payne_2]

As long as your UPS's will hold the machines for the occasional brownout or rolling outage at your site that you get from time to time, and you are taking pains to shutdown during high chance periods, I think you are ok. That's not to say that you won't get caught at some point, but unless you have generator power, etc, you can never rule out a power related outage that causes a HW failure, even during the day.

If you were to ask me, I would think that you have a good enough plan, without shutting down daily.

John

[Jonathan Wegner]

Ok, one more clarification reply:

The UPS are mainly to give a graceful shutdown period in case of powerfailure.

On the new Dell wkstns I will be able to implement the UPS software that will gracefully shut the system down in the event of a power failure. But with the Unix system I don't have that luxury (not enough UPS for every machine to be on one).

90% of the time power isn't a problem, it's that other 10% of the time that I'm worried about.

IMHO - It's harder on the machines to do a daily power off and on than to leave them up 24/7 and run the risk of overnight power failures. I just wanted to know what other peoples opinion on this was. Thanks for the input.

One last thing, I do favor shutting down the machines over long weekends and when we are gone for long periods of time.

[Bernie Vande Griend]

I would definitely not shut them down daily, especially if you are using a UPS. I've been in this situation before and powering on/off will greatly diminish the power supply of the server. What types of UPS are you using? If it is APC, I'd look into using PowerChute so that the system will shutdown and power itself off safely if the UPS runs out of battery time. Other UPSs have similar software. The only reason for shutting them down daily would be if you have a lot of power fluctations and are not protected by UPS. But then you'd still be vulnerable during the day too. Good luck.

[Mark Vollmers]

Jonathon-

I'd have to agree with the others about leaving them up and letting the UPS do what it can. One thing, though, that I would say is to shut off the monitors every night, as opposed to letting them go into sleep mode. I've noticed on our UPS that the monitor is a huge draw on the battery, and can mean a 10-15 minute additional time for the computer if it's not running. I've noticed that windows machines use less power (at least for us), so you might want to get bigger UPS's when you get the dells and swap them with the UPS on the UNIX stations.

Mark

[harry d brown jr]

Jonathan,

I like the idea of powering off the monitors (Mark's idea). THen what you can do is install some UPS monitoring code on the workstations, so that when you do fail over to the UPS, they can gracefully shutdown. Most UPS vendors have software and hardware to do such. Plus you could have the systems page you when this happens, just so you know what you will be facing the next morning.

Then kick your base commanders butt and them them you need a power conditioner for the building, to remove those threatening spikes and sags.

live free or die
harry

[bbutler3295]

Everyone here has touched on alot of facts, but here is a question i think you should ask your boss. when is a light bulb most likely to burn out ?

[Donna Powell]

Hi Jonathan -

I would recommend that you leave the workstations running on the UPS, that's what we buy them for, but when you know of a storm coming, I would highly recommend shutting them down.

As Admins we tend to over think things. As long has you have a good UPS let it do it's job.

Donna Powell-Berry