Maintenance Mode?

[sameerdave]

Hello,

can you please let me know how we can put the servers in Maintenance mode?
if I want to put a few ESX hosts in maintenance mode every Monday night from 1am to 2am, how could I achieve that?

Thanks
Sameer

[arseny]

Hi Sameer,

If you want to put ESX hosts into SCOM Maintenance Mode to avoid monitoring noise, I suggest to use a free tool "SCOM Remote Maintenance Mode Scheduler", and point it and nworks VMware ESX hosts group on a given schedule.

If you would like to put ESX hosts into VMware Maintenance Mode, I suggest to create a PowerShell script that would use "start-task" cmdlet with nworks "enterMaintenanceMode" task, and create a Windows Event Correlated Missing Event detection rule that would check that host was not brought back from Maintenance mode for configurable amount of time, then execute Diagnostic task "exitMaintenanceMode" to automatically bring host back... Something like that.

Cheers,

[sameerdave]

Thanks Arseny.

We do use the SCOM Remote scheduler, and that does not work for individual servers. For the group I haven't tried, but then we don't want to create a group for each ESX host, as that would not make sense. So this option does not work.

In ref to the second option, do you have any powershell script developed? Please let me know where I could find it. As these are agentless monitoring, we are not sure as how we can achieve this.

Thanks
Sameer

[arseny]

Hi Sameer,

Glad to hear world's still small and people use similar tools everywhere.

What I realized is if one just simply adds the scheduled task into Windows Scheduler, it will be executed under Local System credentials, and thus PowerShell will not be able to authenticate against RMS, as needed. The workaround would be to schedule a task to create an event using EVENTCREATE, and then have the response diagnostic task Windows Eventlog rule against it, that would have a RunAs profile.

For the monitor, I believe you should look at, say, description of the event you create being equal to the ID of the monitoring target, so that the recovery task could execute.

Then, you can create another missing Windows Event Log event to bring host back from Maintenance Mode.

I'll follow-up what the script to put a host into Maintenance Mode from newly-created event should look like.

Cheers,