Host powered Off, how to prevent Guests from Autostarting once turned back on (6.7)

[DavidMcLPS]

We had a hardware failure on one of our Hosts.  We manually restored the required affected guests to another host.  Some of these are "Failed Over" to their replicas.

The new part will be replaced tomorrow, but we cannot have the guests autostart, as this will cause larger issues like not being able to "Fail Back" from the replicas.

Is there a way to stop the Host boot and either prevent the guests from autostarting or configure the host to boot in Maintenance mode?

[Errock07]

Hi  By my understanding，u set HA for this Cluster , but when the host hardware failure , some of ur VMs not auto restart on other hosts. And u set VMs autostart on host(if not ,u do not need do anything , just power on the host) Infact , the VMs already power on other Hosts , when the failure host power up and join back to VC ,no VM will start on the host,unless u set something like DRS or other rule(etc, this vm must run on the host) Split brain shouldn`t happen.(about this: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/76898?lang=en_us) I do not know how to boot in Maintenance or stop VM autostart. but u can also set a host-vm anti-anti rule for the failure and these VM. And i have a fool way for safety handle this: if not vSan Cluster , u can unplug all the VM used network`s physic cable and storage cable.  if vSAN cluster，onlu unplug VMs` business cable.

[bryanvaneeden]

As far as I know there is no maintenance mode to boot within. However I am unsure what you mean by "Failed Over". If this was a HA fail-over, which I don't think so looking at your question, then you should disable HA/DRS and Host auto start to be sure that nothing on that hosts boots up. 

I hope this helps.