ESXi 5.1 - Safest Way To Shutdown A Blade

[TheKid7]

What is the Safest Way to Shutdown a Blade for Maintenance?

I know that I need to Migrate all VM's from the Blade that is to be shut down prior to shutting down the Blade.

Next week, I need to shut down (one at a time) all three (3) of my Dell M620 Blades (Dell VRTX) for adding more physical RAM.

Thanks in Advance.

[rcporto · Accepted solution]

Just do the following:

1. put the ESXi host on Maintenance Mode... this will migrate all VMs to another host ina DRS cluster if DRS... if there is no DRS you will need migrate all VMs manually;

2. shutdown the host using the "Shut Down" option on vSphere Client or F12 on DCUI;

3. add more physical memory;

4. power on the host and only after check that the new memory was detected, remove the host from Maintenance Mode.

[TheKid7]

I just successfully upgraded the RAM of Blade #1.

I plan to do a Blade each day to give a short 'Burn-In' of the new RAM after each upgrade.

Thank you.