I have vCenter 4.1 on a physical host with 2 ESXi 4.1 hosts (licensed of course) and several APC UPS's with NIC's. The hosts are in a cluster with HA enabled, vmotion, shared storage on the SAN.
I've configured automatic startup/shutdown for the hosts in the appropriate order with appropriate delays, 'shut down guest' as the shutdown procedure.
Is the proper (reommended) way to shutdown the ESXi hosts in this environment to use the vMA and shutdown the hosts individually, or should vCenter be involved here to do things such as disable HA, and possibly even shutdown the hosts (I guess that's not ideal as the vCenter may not be running)?
1) Will HA kick in when one host starts shutting down and try to restart guests on the remaining HA host, which may be shutting down either simultaneously or shortly after (or not at all depending on the cause of the UPS shutdown)?
2) Would be nice to shutdown the vCenter server as well, but not sure if it's such a great idea to shut it down before the ESXi hosts have completed there shutdown. Does this matter or just shutdown it once the signal is received?
3) The UPS's are in a redundant configuration, and this is configured accordingly on the physical Windows servers running PCNS software to only shutdown when both UPS's lose power. Is the same configuration available with PCNS 3.0.0 for ESXi?
