Joe Holland has just posted his first (but hopefully not the last!) document How to configure ESXi to shutdown using an APC SmartUPS.

His introduction says it all:

This tutorial will show you how to configure a VMWare ESXi install to shutdown using an APC SmartUPS. This proven practice came about because our company was sending a Dell PowerEdge T300 server with ESXi and a APC UPS to one of our sales offices. Because it would just be this server and the UPS there, we needed a way for ESXi to shutdown the guest operating systems and then itself gracefully.

Welcome, Joseph!

Charu Chaubal, who is a prolific VMware white paper author covering Security and Management topics, has built upon Chris Skinner's original Proven Practice: Creating a Microsoft Cluster for VirtualCenter 2.5 by working with VMware Technical Support to publish Reference Implementation: Clustering VirtualCenter 2.5 Using Microsoft Cluster Services.

It's always been a lively discussion about whether to run VirtualCenter in a virtual machine, and even livelier on how to make it highly available. Over the years, VirtualCenter has assumed more and more importance as a central management console. Gone are the days of the MUI (remember those?!) and now we are talking about multiple services like VirtualCenter, the License Server, and now VMware Update Manager as the central management programs.

The latest ESX Servers can keep running, as can the virtual machines on top of them, without VirtualCenter and company - but how us administrators hate to be blind!

Making VC (and friends) highly available is now essential for most people, but the choices of process and technology are many - this particular Reference Implementation takes one solution - do you have another? Neverfail? Other products?

Join in and tell us what you do - there are hundreds of thousands of like minded people out there. Start a discussion in the Availability Zone.

Steve