Cisco UCS C 210 - M2 Power Button Issue

[Wilson Samuel]

Hi All,

Just wondering if anyone has experienced the inconvenience of the Cisco UCS 210 Power Button. (attached Data Sheet).

The Power button on the UCS 210, appears as an innocent power LED, and is protruding and very easily activated (even on my laptop I have to press Power Button for a few seconds to activate Hibernation or Shutdown).

I have had 1 incident with Cisco UCS 210 M2 Server, where myself and in another incident where a team mate accidentally turned the Server shutdown, in both cases while closing the KVM tray,  the fingers just brushed with the button and activated the system shutdown.

Interestingly the power button is “protruding” unlike the normal power buttons which is slightly in a “depression” where one has to use a pen point or pin to press the power button.

Fortunately in both cases the servers were in installation mode/lab mode and didn’t cause any business downtime.

I was curious if anyone has come up with an ingenious solution or Cisco has improvised it in the new UCS 210 Servers.

Kind Regards

Wilson Samuel

[chaausti]

When you tap the power button, ESXi will do whatever it does when it learns the power button was pressed. I do not know of any supported way to change what ESXi does when you press power button, and by default ESXi will gracefully shutdown the server without going into maintenance mode which causes all the VMs to power off. This will take several seconds to complete after tapping the power button.

If you hold the power button for about 6 seconds the server should be hard powered down immediatly, but may also begin a soft shutfown during those 6 seconds.

Did the server hard power off immediatly when the power button was pressed, or did it take several seconds to power down?