I currently admin a sizable VMWare ESX deployment hosting a couple dozen domains and over a hundred Windows servers. Most are for testing and could be rebuilt pretty quickly, but some are for production deployment – at least one of which is fairly irreplaceable. This past summer our office suffered some extended outages due to city-wide power interruptions, so it was a no-brainer to approve the purchase of PowerChute services for these servers. Turns out, APC is lagging a little on getting an ESX 3.5-compatible current version of PCNS out there so I decided to get v2.2.1 running on my five ESX hosts.

Here’s how I did it – mostly for my own future reference:

Step 1 – get the software

Obtain the PCNS 2.2.1 rpm (not 2.2.3, which won’t install) from APC:

ftp://ftp.apcc.com/apc/public/software/unix/linux/pcns/221vmware

Upload this to your ESX server using some utility like FileZilla or WinSCP over port 22. I just placed it in /tmp

Step 2 – open ESX firewall for PCNS

Now, open up some ports in the ESX firewall after opening up an SSH session to ESX (please note that the quotes in these statements will not copy over, it seems, in PuTTY. Make sure the config changes you submit have quotes in them):

esxcfg-firewall -o 80,tcp,out,”APC PowerChute Port 80″
esxcfg-firewall -o 3052,tcp,out,”APC PowerChute Port 3052″
esxcfg-firewall -o 3052,tcp,in,”APC PowerChute Port 3052″
esxcfg-firewall -o 3052,udp,out,”APC PowerChute Port 3052″
esxcfg-firewall -o 3052,udp,in,”APC PowerChute Port 3052″

Step 3 – Install PNCS and configure

Switch the to directory you placed the rpm in and install using the following command:

rpm -ihv pcns-2.2.1-100.i386.rpm

Start the PCNS configuration script using the following command:

/usr/local/bin/PowerChute/PCNSConfig.sh

Some things to look out for when setting up PCNS using that command-line wizard:

  • I picked option 3 when running the script since I had 2 APCs to configure. Presumably you could pick option one for a single APC setup.
  • The script asks for the IP of the management card on the APC, the user name and password (I used the admin username/password) and then the Authentication Phrase. This phrase needs to be set up in the APC’s management interface prior to trying to connect this PCNS client – setup uses this phrase to register the client with the APC.
  • Once you finish the install script, it’ll ask you if you’d like to start the PCNS service – do so, then go to the URL of the PCNS web console for your ESX server: http://yourvmhostname:3052 and log in using the admin credentials you specified prior.

Step 4 – disable UPS shutdown

The final step that I chose based on this excellent writeup of installing PCNS was to disable the default behavior of shutting down the UPS once the client has shut down during a power event. Since I have several physical servers connected to these UPSes, I really didn’t want to mess with actually shutting down the APC itself automatically. To disable this, simply connect to the client web management console (the port 3052 link in step 3), navigate to “Configure Shutdown,” uncheck the box next to “Turn off the UPS after the shutdown finishes” and apply.

Further thanks for Stefan Schuller’s post on setting up PCNS and the commented link to the 2.2.1 rpm…