VMware Communities: Setting order of machine startup after a crash or powerloss

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7 Replies Last post: Dec 12, 2008 5:59 AM by kklueber

Setting order of machine startup after a crash or powerloss

Apr 28, 2008 1:59 AM

Svedja 43 posts since
Jun 22, 2006

We had a major powerloss the other day (due to a human mistake) and our datacenter lost all it's power.

After that we had to restart all of our machines, one by one.

As it was weekend we didn't have our regular staff here, and as a result several machines were started in "wrong" order were ie database dependencies weren't fullfilled.

Is there any way to tell VC in which order to start up machines? Preferably set order within a group av virtual machines (or resource-pools maybe?).

The same could apply if an ESX machine crashes.

Tags: 2.5, vc, esx, cluster, ha

Reply Re: Setting order of machine startup after a crash or powerloss Apr 28, 2008 2:41 AM

alanrenouf 500 posts since
Feb 28, 2006

Dont have a console in front of me at the moment but I cant remember if there is a way to do this, the only thing I could think of was in 3.5 there is a new feature which delays the BIOS screen, could you use this to your advantageby setting different delays on the servers ?

VM BIOS Delay
One new feature, VM BIOS Delay setting, is very handy if you are
trying to get to the Boot menu to boot from a CD-ROM. Prior to 3.5, the
VMware BIOS screen only showed for a very brief second or two,
which made it difficult to get to the BIOS Setup Menu (F2) or Boot
Device Menu (ESC). You can now edit the VM's settings.

There is a boot options selection under advanced on the
options tab, here you can set a power-on boot delay in
milli-seconds.

Reply Re: Setting order of machine startup after a crash or powerloss Apr 28, 2008 3:24 AM

in response to: alanrenouf

Rajeev S 164 posts since
Oct 27, 2006

Hi,

You can set the automatic startup and shutdown in each ESX host (under configuration>> VM startup/shutdown). You can configure the startup and shutdown delay in that. This option can help u.

Hope this helps

Reply Re: Setting order of machine startup after a crash or powerloss Apr 28, 2008 3:40 AM

in response to: Rajeev S

VBarak 43 posts since
Jun 26, 2007

(under configuration>> VM startup/shutdown).

this is good for a non-clustered (HA\DRS) environment..

in HA environments you need to configure the priorities of your server (low\med\high) and the HA will start them from high to low...

Reply Re: Setting order of machine startup after a crash or powerloss Apr 28, 2008 3:48 AM

in response to: alanrenouf

Svedja 43 posts since
Jun 22, 2006

Usefull only with a few machines. To cumbersome for many machines.

Reply Re: Setting order of machine startup after a crash or powerloss Apr 28, 2008 3:52 AM

in response to: VBarak

Svedja 43 posts since
Jun 22, 2006

This might be almost the thing I'm looking for, at least for the moment.

It limits me to three levels, and they it would be "bios delay" that would have to be used.

I would realy like to be able to do a "flowchart" with machine dependencies in VC.

Both to help to start the machines and to easily document it.

We have it on paper now, but as always that kind of information "rot" with time and changes.

Reply Re: Setting order of machine startup after a crash or powerloss Apr 28, 2008 3:59 AM

in response to: Svedja

VBarak 43 posts since
Jun 26, 2007

yes but you do it just 1 time (in general) and you can always create it in a perl script of strating the machines in your order...

Reply Re: Setting order of machine startup after a crash or powerloss Dec 12, 2008 5:59 AM

in response to: VBarak

kklueber 2 posts since
Apr 11, 2007

we had a similar outage where we had to restart every VM, we also have a requirement to start some VMs in a particular order, understand this can be scripted on a single host, but how can you script this across an entire ESX cluster?

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