BUILD UPS tip

[Sir.Robin]

So i finally received my new UPS! A Sinewave from Cyberpower.
I got the 900VA model cuz it's fairly cheap and i don't require any run time. Only enough to get my box down.

Reason for me to get this particular brand is because they have made automatic shutdown with vSphere simple (supports HyperV too).
That is a neat point, since i'm running my primary FreeNAS on ESXi.

You can download the agent VA (Centos based), deploy/configure it, and voila. It shuts your entire host/VM's gracefully :)

Now, does it work? Yes it does. I pull the plug, and after my own specified time the ESXi host starts shutting down my VM's and finally shuts itself down. Sweet!!

But i'm not completely sold on it still. Reason is:
PowerPanel Agent (the VA) is not officially supported on the home types of UPS's.
And so thats probably why it has some bugs and quircks in it.

Got some testing to do i guess...


So if it can be trusted... remains to bee seen for my part.

Here's a blog i found on it:
http://www.tinkertry.com/configure-automated-shutdown-homelab-datacenter-15-minutes/

 

[cyberjock]

I use a Cyberpower exactly how you are, VM and all, for almost 8 months now(and on 3 different friend's systems). It works great!

One thing to watch out for is that after some pre-determined time limit, the UPS will turn off. And I mean off as in completely off. Even if power is restored. Once it hits the point of the system shutting down, the UPS will eventually go down too. Don't be a fool like my friend(who lost some VMs this way) and boot the server back up immediately and walked away. 15 minutes later we wondered where his VMs went. We looked at his server and the UPS was off and naturally his server was off too. Improper shutdown and lost VMs. He rolled back to a snapshot.

Call to cyberpower confirmed this is "designed behavior". If you aren't willing to accept that the UPS will turn itself off (to save the battery when the server goes off) then you should purchase one of their server-grade product(read: 5x the price for the same crap).

So if you ever end up in a situation where the server shuts itself down, give the UPS 5-10 minutes to turn itself off. For us, despite the claim it was designed behavior, once or twice we couldn't get the thing to go "off". We were trying to determine what the criteria were for it turning off, and it eluded us. We gave up after 2 hours of trying because it just wasn't worth the continued waste of time on it.

 

[HoneyBadger]

One thing to watch out for is that after some pre-determined time limit, the UPS will turn off. And I mean off as in completely off. Even if power is restored. Once it hits the point of the system shutting down, the UPS will eventually go down too ... Call to cyberpower confirmed this is "designed behavior". If you aren't willing to accept that the UPS will turn itself off (to save the battery when the server goes off) then you should purchase one of their server-grade product(read: 5x the price for the same crap).

I did not know this, but it makes me damned happy all three of my UPSes are APC. Thanks for the note!

 

[cyberjock]

I did not know this, but it makes me damned happy all three of my UPSes are APC. Thanks for the note!

Actually, you aren't safe.

From what I've read almost every major manufacture is going this route. Too many people like the 3 of us know better and don't buy the ultra-elitist-expensive UPSes for our home servers. And they want their free money!

And, to make matters worse, apparently APC owns Cyberpower. Cyberpower is APC's "cheaper brand name".

 

[HoneyBadger]

Actually, you aren't safe.

From what I've read almost every major manufacture is going this route. Too many people like the 3 of us know better and don't buy the ultra-elitist-expensive UPSes for our home servers. And they want their free money!

And, to make matters worse, apparently APC owns Cyberpower. Cyberpower is APC's "cheaper brand name".

How dare we try to save money by not buying their five-figure UPSes! Don't we know they have gold-plated toilets to flush those $100 bills down?

I haven't seen that "shutdown timer" behavior on any of mine yet, but I'll have to take that into account on any new gear I buy. Seems like stupid behavior - I can see "shutdown if total stored energy is less than X" so you don't totally drain the cells, but a timer? Silly.

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah, my old model from around 2009 doesn't do it. But my friends that he bought that is the exact same model number as mine(but a different hardware rev.) does it. Very disappointing.

The situation is actually interesting. He bought one(some newer APC or something.. I forget exactly which one) from Amazon. It arrived and had this behavior. We weren't happy. If power is restored a UPS shouldn't turn itself off. That's just stupid.

So, we called Amazon. Did you know they don't do UPS returns!? It's considered "hazardous material". I kid you not, look at any UPS listing on Amazon and it'll say something like:

• The Item is non-returnable
• Special Shipping Information: This item cannot be returned to Amazon.com. For additional information concerning this policy please visit our Product Specific Returns Policy Page.

So we weren't happy and he didn't have a UPS that would work for our function. We called them and they did their standard 'we're really sorry, but you can't return that' business. He told them he was unhappy. They told him to call APC for support and that it clearly states no returns. They were right, but who really looks at that stuff!?

So we called APC(or whatever it was) and they said they won't replace it because its not defective. I said "bullshit.. it's defective by design.. we can't use this".

So we went back to Amazon and they just gave him a full refund and said to keep it! He buys about $75k worth of stuff through Amazon every year, so they do love him. Keep it he did.

So then, he bought the same model as mine since mine works fine. But, his does the weird "turn off the UPS for no reason" and mine doesn't. We called Cyberpower and guess what, they told us the same thing! "It's designed like that sir. If you are using this in a server you should purchase our server UPSes. They are designed to work with the needs of servers." Yeah, no thanks. Not with an outrageous price tag like they have!

 

[Sir.Robin]

But but but... i noticed that annoying thang... it actually counted down in the display! But the i set the "Also turn off the UPS" to "No" and then i testet power failure at least 4 times without any stupid UPS shutdown! :)

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah. We did too. That setting allegedly only works on business UPSes.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk

 

[indy]

One thing to watch out for is that after some pre-determined time limit, the UPS will turn off. And I mean off as in completely off. Even if power is restored. Once it hits the point of the system shutting down, the UPS will eventually go down too.

Are you saying that some UPS can not switch back to outlet power once the battery backup has been activated?

 

[cyberjock]

What I'm saying is that once the shutdown process has begun for your computer, even if power is restored, the UPS may still power off after a few minutes. The logic for this was to have your computer shutdown, then the UPS turn off automatically to extend the life of the batteries. The UPS turns itself off because the expectation is that you aren't around to shutdown the computer yourself, so turning off the UPS even if power is restored has no consequence. Of course, those expectations may be unreasonable for some people(like me, and possibly you). For us, we have a pfsense box, cablemodem, and other things on the UPS that won't turn off when the power is lost. But we wanted the UPS to run itself down to completely dead because usually when we lose power here its never for more than a few minutes. The server will power off after 1 minute on the battery, but we had hoped/expected that we'd never see the cablemodem, pfsense box, etc actually lose power. Since the home uses Vonage, you'll have to manually powerup the pfsense box to restore phone services. This could be dangerous if an emergency arose and you needed to use the phone.

Remember, this is just what I've seen and what I've heard from Cyberpower and APC tech support. The reasoning could be very wrong. I do have background knowledge in batteries and I can vouch that their reasoning is not completely illogical from the strictly technological standpoint. From the expectations they are making though, I consider that unreasonable for customers. But hey, that's life. Right?

 

[indy]

Honestly I have a hard time believing that this is the expected behavior of a home-user ups (not saying that it is not true).
Reason being that hooking up a pc and voip equipment is common practice for home-users and obviously safety-related.

I will check what my (new) CyberPower DL450ELCD ups does with the pc shutting down and a small additional load attached.
Its not really relevant for me, but I would send it back anyway just for being a dumb design.

 

[cyberjock]

Honestly I have a hard time believing that this is the expected behavior of a home-user ups (not saying that it is not true).
Reason being that hooking up a pc and voip equipment is common practice for home-users and obviously safety-related.

I will check what my (new) CyberPower DL450ELCD ups does with the pc shutting down and a small additional load attached.
Its not really relevant for me, but I would send it back anyway just for being a dumb design.

We tried to send it back. There was nobody that would accept it. After buying the same brand and model that I've used for years and his new one doing it(I even took mine over to his house and with everything connected at his house mine worked fine) it's pretty confirmed that they are starting to play games.

Nothing new with game playing. Just look at the current WD Green/Red issues. The WD Reds are looking more and more like they are literally Greens with a Red sticker on them and WD warrantying them for an extra year. :P

 

[no_connection]

If you ask the server to shut down(and the UPS is aware of it), isn't the desired action to pull power from it so it will start when power returns?
Or do you have to manually start the UPS once the power returns?

If the server turnoff period is not reached, does it still turn off itself if power is returned?

 

[cyberjock]

If you ask the server to shut down(and the UPS is aware of it), isn't the desired action to pull power from it so it will start when power returns?

pull power from it so it will start??? Define "it" please.

Or do you have to manually start the UPS once the power returns?

You have you manually start the UPS when power restores.

If the server turnoff period is not reached, does it still turn off itself if power is returned?

No. Once the server hits the trigger point where the server will shutdown, the UPS will turn off at some point. If your server takes too long to shutdown, the damn UPS will turn itself off on a server that is still shutting down!

 

[jgreco]

I think y'all are a little confused here.

For the dumber UPS's that have communications capability, typically they send notice to the computer that mains power has failed, then a while later they will send notice that backup power failure is also imminent. At that point, the UPS reasonably expects that the attached PC is going down. It should give a reasonable allowance for time for the PC to shut down and then cut power. Even if mains power is restored, the proper course of action is to cut load power. The load is assumed to have shut itself off.

Potentially the UPS could merely cycle power in an effort to restart the attached load, but the proper variables for doing this successfully are complicated. The better quality intelligent UPS's have a variety of controls that do in fact allow the unit to restore load power once mains power returns and the batteries have recharged to a certain point.

You can make all sorts of arguments about other CPE and VOIP adapters, but the truth of the matter is that if that's what you need, you're looking for a different type of UPS device. The typical deskside UPS that has basic computer communications capability is in fact designed for that particular task.

I fully understand and appreciate that the behaviour is inappropriate for the uses you guys can come up with, but basically I think you're just looking for a smarter class of UPS but instead buying something cheaper that is close to, but not really as good as, that smarter class. In this business, it is often the smallest of details that screws you in the end.

I once made someone very unhappy by suggesting a nice newer model APC SmartUPS (SMT class) to them. The SMT's cannot be turned off by a single button press; this seems to me to be a great feature, but was distressing to the person in question, who was used to using their BackUPS power switch to turn off all their accessories. This is, again, an example of how specific characteristics of a UPS are designed to meet certain use cases. It is not all right to assume that any UPS is good for every application.

Sadly, it is wicked difficult to know in advance exactly what you need.

If I were a smarty pants, I'd tell cyberjock that this is an ECC type argument, just in the realm of UPS's...

 

[indy]

I will check what my (new) CyberPower DL450ELCD ups does with the pc shutting down and a small additional load attached.

I'll be damned. It DID shut the power off after a couple of minutes with lots of battery remaining.
This is actually blowing my mind.
The way I see it the main function of a ups is to provide power to its outlets.
There are physical limits to this obviously, but other than that there are no two ways about it.
Now if a ups thinks its smarter than that, this is better damn well documented in the manual.
Which it is NOT.

 

[jgreco]

If you want a unit that simply provides power to its outlets, you might be better off buying a unit that simply provides power to its outlets.

If you hook up a USB- or network-communications enabled UPS to a computer, and the system is configured to shut down the computer, it is unclear why you would expect the UPS to keep powering indefinitely a load that has reported itself as about to power off. It should wait long enough to ensure that the load has powered off and then drop the supply to the load. This is a simple state diagram that makes complete sense.

Now if it is just randomly turning off after mains power fail, that'd be a bad thing.

It is also a bad thing if that is not something you've designed for, which might be a failure in documentation on their part or a failure in qualification testing on your part (or both).

 

[jgreco]

That seems a good assessment. I can't comment on CyberPower's doc since I haven't got one though.

 

[Sir.Robin]

Well, if you look in the LCD display of your UPS, you see it has a countdown for the UPS shutdown when shutdown is triggered.

However, as in said i previous post, my Cyberpower does not do this anymore after i set the "Also Shutdown UPS" setting to "no".

 

[jgreco]

Well that seems entirely reasonable then.