The traditional approach to UPS power management is: “If there is a loss of power, start shutting down the server.” That has worked well for years, but virtualization challenges the concept of what a “server” is, or indeed, where in the world the server is located.
For many good reasons, virtualization is taking hold in organizations of all sizes, even small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs). However, for all its advantages, virtualization brings some unique challenges from a power perspective:
- Each physical machine is hosting more business services than ever. When a single host supports 20-40 virtual machines (VMs), a power problem for one host could easily bring down many essential services. Is your power system up to this reality?
- Workloads can be dynamically reallocated, but the power infrastructure is fixed. Can you track the whereabouts and power protection status of VMs as they are migrated among hosts?
- Virtualization adds management complexity. Many of the tools being used today require IT administrators to load software on every VM – and to understand command line programming and how to program and debug solutions.
If you support a virtualized environment, you’ve probably been wondering, how much time should you have to spend managing power instead of managing IT?
Dell has redefined the way power protection is managed in virtualized IT environments. Dell UPS management tools seamlessly integrate with VMware vCenter Server, Microsoft SCVMM and Citrix XenServer virtualization software (ESXi, Hyper-V, and XenServer hypervisors) for graceful shutdown of VMs in the event of a power problem. The Dell UPS software also supports live migration of VMs for VMware (vMotion) and Hyper-V (Live Migration).
With Dell UPS management software:
- There’s no need to install the UPS software on each VM.
- Power profiles are automatically synchronized with the virtualized network infrastructure.
- The Dell UPS agent can gracefully shut down virtualized servers on demand or during outages.
- During a power failure, VMs can automatically be migrated to a safe host.
The UPS Local Node Manager (ULNM) software is free for an unlimited number of servers. The management console software is free for up to 32 UPSs and PDUs.
If you want to streamline and automate power management for your Dell virtualized environment, find out more by downloading the free white paper, Conquering the Power Challenges of Virtualized Environments.