High-reliability uninterruptible power supply manager for critical virtualization cluster

Abstract

Information technology servers are complex, delicate, and expensive systems; power grid interruption is one of the possible causes that can lead to hardware damage or logical disk structure damage, with severe consequences. Moreover, a power grid drop causes a sudden interruption of the services managed by a server. Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) provide backup power when the regular power grid source drops. UPSs can only maintain a server for a short time. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce a blackout manager who can correctly shut down the server activities. Moreover, the manager must be able to restore the servers' status when the electrical grid power returns to its normal state. This paper proposes a possible UPS power manager able to manage servers during a prolonged electrical blackout. The UPS power manager identifies the blackout and keeps the servers safe by saving their state and shutting them down properly. Following the power grid restoration, the UPS power manager restarts the servers and restores their state. The proposed approach has been evaluated on a virtualization cluster used for critical activities at the Politecnico di Torino.