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New office success!

A fairly unique opportunity arose for me towards the end of 2010: I was able to design, purchase components for, and then oversee the implementation of a new office infrastructure. This was due to a new physical build, and based on the success of the previous SAN and Infrastrucure project, I was essentially given full control over all aspects of the IT infrastructure.

It was an extensive piece of work and covered about six months of my life before finally going live at the end of November 2010, it involved visits to the site before building works were completed; setup of an entire dedicated test lab; and various correspondances thrasing out the business requirements for the new build.

The actual move-and-go-live happened over a weekend, the staff downed tools on Friday, had their PCs moved over the weekend and were able to log on and start work again Monday morning, a huge achievement bearing in mind that the entire system had changed: everything from the cables to the printers to the back end storage was now completely different.

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Quick: Installing APC Network Shutdown (PCNS) on VMWare ESXi 4.1

This is actually documented in APC Answer ID 11144 but I couldn’t find the link without actually e-mailling APC and asking for it, so hopefully by posting it here with a more sensible title others might stumble across it.

Since ESXi 4.1 was released the automatic-shutdown of hosts using PowerChute Network Shutdown (PCNS) no longer works and needs patching, to do this you must firstly completely uninstall the existing installation of network shutdown by running the uninstall script, mine is located here:

sudo /opt/APC/PowerChute/uninstall

Download the new version from the APC website (the username and password is embedded on that page, but at time of writing it’s ftp://apcftp.apc.com and then, despite what the instructions say, I didn’t rename install_en.sh to install.sh I just ran it:

  1. Download the above file and extract it, giving you five (5) files including the README.txt
  2. Copy these files into /tmp along with the original installation files
  3. Run sudo /tmp/install_en.sh
  4. Follow the on-screen instructions
  5. As per the APC Answer file, copy the shutdown and uninstall commands over, mine looked like this: cp /tmp/shutdown /opt/APC/PowerChute/group1/bin/shutdown and cp /tmp/uninstall /opt/APC/PowerChute/uninstall

Listing of files extracted for PCNS under 4.1 installation(Screenshot showing list of files before installation)

This felt quite a bit better to me, it actually requested an IP for the ESXi host it was supposed to be controlling as well as registering with the management interface on the UPS correctly – this is more than I got when I used the version for ESXi 4.0 – I have tested this by issuing PowerChute shutdown command from the UPS and both of my ESXi boxes shut down correctly.

Remember that you’ll need to have configured the Low Battery Duration to at least 5 minutes under the UPS web interface for this to be effective and worth having.