VMShutdownManager takes the fear out of power failure
What should you do if a failed restart brings IT and therefore sales to a standstill for a whole day? Ask Starline and the Enterprise Storage Solutions team. They have the right answer for a smooth restart.
RIWOTEC GmbH from Bad Blankenburg in the German state of Thuringia was hit twice last winter. A power failure paralysed the IT of the medium-sized mould construction specialist, consisting of 4 hosts and 30 virtual machines. In one of these cases, a stray wild animal in the substation was the reason for the power failure.
Although RIWOTEC was already equipped with many uninterruptible power supplies, these had different capacities and therefore different running times. As a result, IT administrator Daniel Scheibler always had to intervene manually to ensure that the hyper-converged environment could be restarted smoothly.
In addition, after such abrupt interruptions, it could take up to four hours before the physical and virtualised servers were up and running again. One such outage, for example, even meant that sales came to a standstill for an entire day. This is an expensive and unacceptable situation for RIWOTEC.
Together with the management, the administrator therefore discussed possible solutions with a centralised control system that would no longer require manual intervention. For example, those responsible considered a diesel emergency power generator in combination with a centralised UPS system.
Solution found
However, a call to long-standing partner Starline revealed a completely different solution: Starline project manager Andreas Freisen recommends the VMShutdownManager from bn-its in such cases. This always ensures a smooth shutdown and an equally precise restart of the systems. As he and his team from Enterprise Storage Solutions had already planned and implemented the existing system, they immediately knew how best to integrate the shutdown and restart tool.
The integration was carried out professionally by the experts at bn-its. The new Starline server with the VMShutdownManager running on it was quickly connected.
However, the challenge lay in the integration into the overall system: first of all, the dependencies between the physical and virtual systems had to be determined and then incorporated into the shutdown and restart plan accordingly.
Finally, integration with the new centralised uninterruptible power supply was carried out so that the shutdown is automatically initiated by the UPS via the VMShutdownManager in the event of a power failure. A final test confirmed the efficiency of the shutdown process.
Conclusion
Daniel Scheibler is now very satisfied. In the event of a power failure, the shutdown procedure, which only takes 25 minutes, starts fully automatically when the UPS's residual holding time falls below a configured threshold value. During this time, a 10 kVA UPS provides the power supply. When the power returns, the restart also takes 25 minutes. This all happens without any loss of data, so that daily work is maintained. That's how it should be.
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About bn-its banking & network it solutions GmbH
banking & network it solutions GmbH is active in the fields of software development and IT services/IT consulting. In addition to the VMShutdownManager, bn-its offers solutions in the field of remote access/VPN, central management of the Windows Defender and central desktop management.
About RIWOTEC GMBH
RIWOTEC GMBH is a medium-sized company based in Bad Blankenburg/Thuringia. As a system provider, RIWOTEC customers receive customised solutions of the highest quality and in accordance with their specific requirements. RIWOTEC supplies well-known manufacturers from the household appliances, electrical and electronics, security technology, medical technology, automotive and other industries and offers customers competitive solutions for all technological and logistical challenges, from the initial idea through to series production.
