DR during Storm Season

[kc5ruj]

Sorry to ask what's probably a noob question, but I need some advice.  I have an ESXi 5 cluster with four hosts and about 60 guest VMs.  The data center is for a private higher ed school with a limited budget.  Because of that we do not have a backup generator and our UPS is old and inadequate.  Along with all that, we're entering severe weather season and I need to be prepared to shut down my ESX cluster quickly.  Here's my question.  Would it be advisable to configure the hosts to power down the guests when they are shutdown rather than shutting down each guest VM and then shutting down the hosts?  Can this be scripted?

Sorry to be so noobish, but each power outage we get is an impending disaster so I have to be as prepared as I can be.

Tony

[kunaludapi · Accepted solution]

I have create a script for the same, You can use powercli to automate shutting down all VMs and esxi host.

vGeek: Shutdow virtual datacenter quickly using script

[kc5ruj]

Awesome!  Thanks for the script.  that's just what I needed.

Tony

[kunaludapi]

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[GAPCABIV]

I have a very similar script but it shuts VMs down based upon folders that they are in.  This way I can shutdown Web Servers before App Servers and App Servers before DB servers etc....  Then when it comes time to power on again, I start VMs in the reverse order, by folder still, than they were shutdown.

My ShutdownPriority folder numbers are listed in the notes of each VM and the first thing my script does is move VMs into the correct ShutdownPriority folder based upon the details in the notes section of the VM.  Once all the VMs are in the correct folder I send the command to shutdown all VMs in ShutdownPriority1 folder followed 1 minute later by the ShutdownPriority2 folder etc.. up to ShutdownPriority9.  Then vCenter and all the hosts are shutdown.

Powering on I bring up the hosts and vCenter then all the VMs in ShutdownPriority9, 8, 7...1.

I have had to use the script one time, during a planned datacanter outage a couple of years ago and everything worked like a charm!

[kc5ruj]

That makes sense because you definitely need to restart in a structured order.  Using folders is a great way to manage ESX.  I'm in the process of rebuilding our backup environment to base off folders rather than hosts or VMs.

So, to use this script do I need to reconfigure the power management settings for the hosts or VMs?