Apc Powerchute Server 2008 R2

Setting up Hyper-V with a UPS. Can Windows Server 2008 R2 detect a APC UPS connected over serial and have the same power control fuctions as USB.

Issue: PowerChute Network Shutdown Windows installer fails to launch and PowerChute service stops working on Windows Server Core 64bit with WOW64 disabled. Product Line: PowerChute Network Shutdown v3.0, v3.0.1, v3.1, v4.X Environment: Windows Server 2008 R2 Core, Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012 Core, Windows Server 2012 R2 Core. Cause: This can occur if the WOW64 Support feature is not present. The PowerChute installer and the service wrapper (pcns.exe) are 32-bit applications and require WOW64 Support Windows feature. Resolution: Install the WOW64 Support feature by opening a command prompt with administrator privileges and typing the command below: dism.exe /Online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:ServerCore-WOW64.

Recently I took over some system management at a client. They run Windows 2008 Server x64 and a Windows Server 2008 VM under VMware Server 2.0 and a LAN with some client machines A lot of things were not covered, backup, power outage, etc, so I’m implementing those step by step. They now have an APC UPS connected through USB. There are a lot of references on the internet about the APC software (well, more like UPS vendor supplied software in general) being crap.

Luckily, Windows Server 2008 (and 2003) have built-in support for APC UPSes. Furthermore when Windows Server shuts down, VMware Server needs to perform some actions on the guests as well. This post covers the configuration of both:-) Basically, Windows recognizes the APC UPS as a UPS battery (so it appears like your server is a laptop with a huge battery ). So configuring is pretty straightforward: it is about finding where the configuration settings. I didn’t find out all of this myself, has a good starting point on setting up Hyper-V. He uses Windows Server 2008 R2 (the client uses the non-R2), and Hyper-V (the client uses VMware), so there are a couple of differences. Configuration of USB connected APC UPS on Windows Server First a warning: There is a bug in Windows Server 2008:.

The suggested solution is to hibernate or sleep instead. Sleep is not a good idea when running on batteries. But hibernate works fine with batteries. I’m not not sure if this bug is on a few or all systems involved, but you have been warned:-) Configuring the UPS First we are going to make sure that the UPS can wake up the PC (for instance, when power comes back up, or when the PC is asleep and the UPS loses power). Note that not all PC’s • Run the device manager (devmgmt.msc) • In the “View” menu, select “Devices by connection” • Browse for USB devices that look like this: • Go to the last tab, and make sure that the “Allow this device to wake the computer” is checked: Press OK to close this dialog. Download komik shingeki no kyojin. Then we are going to make sure the power plan works around the bug described above. • In the control panel, go to power stetings (or run “powercfg.cpl” to get there in one step) • Choose a plan, then click on the “change plan settings” for that plan: • Now you are in the “Edit plan settings” dialog.

Here you click “change advanced power settings” here: • This “Power Options” is for editing the “Advanced settings”. (the direct command to run to get this dialog is this: “C: Windows system32 rundll32.exe” shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL PowerCfg.cpl @0,/editplan:8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c ) Make sure that the “Critical battery action” for “On battery” is “Hibernate” (see the above bug why) Make sure your the “Critical battery level” for “On battery” is large enough so your system can in fact hibernate Press “OK” or “Apply” when you made changes. Testing the “Critical battery action” The easiest way to test the “Critical battery action” is to pull the mains plug from the UPS, then let the PC drain the UPS.

To speed up the process, you need to make your PC use as much power as possible and/or temporarily increase the “On battery” percentage a lot. Mark Allen has a nice which you can use for the former.

Note that the current implementation for Prime95 uses multiple cores, so you probably don’t need to run multiple instances of it any more. Configuring VMware server to perform shutdown actions Further reading If you run VMware server, you need to configure it so it properly shuts down the guest VMs when the server itself shuts down. Of course this is needed when you have chosen above to let the “Critical battery action” shutdown your server (only recommended if you are using Windows Server 2008 R2!). But in general this is a good idea anyway, as you might manually want to shutdown or restart your host once in a while (Windows Updates anyone?).