Proper way to shut down all hosts in a cluster

[SHJCHEN]

i have a small environment with 2 esxi hosts in a cluster. my company is going to have 2 planned power outages that i need to shut all the servers down including the esxi hosts. what is the right way to do this to ensure everything's properly shutdown and no vmotion will be triggered as everything will be off??

thanks!

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Community - The order you will need to shute down is:

1. Shut down the VMs
   
2. Place the hosts in MAintenance mode
   
3. Shut down the hosts
   
4. Shut down vCenter (if vCenter is a vm you will need to connect to each host seperately and shut it down.)
   

To bring everything back up

1. Start the hosts
   
2. Start vCenter
   

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

in addition to what weinstein5 already said, ensure you shut down the VM's in a proper order. If e.g. the DC's are virtual machines you may want to shut them down after all other VM's have been shut down and as a last step shut down the ESXi host on which the DC's were running.

Basically the same (just the other way around) applies, when you power the environment back on.

André

[Alceryes]

...in addition to weinstein5 and a.p.'s answers, if all your DC's are being turned off and you normally connect via hostname and/or use domain credentials, be sure you know the IP's and local admin credentials of all the hosts.

[SHJCHEN]

Re: Proper way to shut down all hosts in a cluster

Welcome to the Community - The order you will need to shute down is:

1. Shut down the VMs
2. Place the hosts in MAintenance mode
3. Shut down the hosts
4. Shut down vCenter (if vCenter is a vm you will need to connect to each host seperately and shut it down.)

To bring everything back up

1. Start the hosts
2. Start vCenter

do i need to put hosts in maintenance mode prior to shutting down VMs??

i have a VSA cluster environment with 2 hosts. according to your answer, after shut down vCenter, i would shut down each VSA accordingly as well, rite??

to bring everything backup,

1. start the hosts--> VSA --> vCenter

thanks!!

[blu60077]

Hello,

I just would like to clarify step 4... because in my situation, vcenter is setup as a vm...

4 . Shut down vCenter (if vCenter is a vm you will need to connect to each host separately and shut it down.)

meaning... from my desktop computer.... I would log into each host one at a time via ROOT...

then...

• Shut down the VMs .... now... since in this instance, I would also shut down my Vcenter VM?
• Place the hosts in Maintenance mode
• Shut down the hosts

any update is appreciated

blu

[JackyWooHoo]

If your vCenter is a VM just ensure you are connected to the ESXi Host when you issue a shutdown of the vCenter Guest OS. Assuming this setup, that you are also running your Express Edition of SQL. Then you can power down down your ESXi Host after you put it into maintenance mode. If your ESXi Host somehow grows more than 4, ensure you fix your vCenter VM to always start at a specific host so you don't have to hunt for it if a unplanned power outage happens. Knowing will save some trouble.

[Heyvoon]

Hello and welcome,

According to what have been said already I would add like this...

1. Shut down the VMs
2. Place the VSA Cluster in Maintenance mode
3. Place the hosts in Maintenance mode
4. Shut down hosts
   1. If vCenter is on a VM ...
      1. Shut down the host that doesn´t contain the vCenter first
   2. if vCenter is physical the order doesn´t matter.
5. Shut down vCenter (if vCenter is a vm you will need to connect to each host seperately and shut it down.)

To bring everything back up

1. Start the hosts
2. Start VSA Cluster
3. Start vCenter

Note: Careful with VSA Cluster on 2 nodes! Specially if you have vCenter and VSA Cluster Service (VSACS) on the same VM as the vCenter!

Cheers everyone!

[OscarDavey]

Proper way to shutdown the ESX Host.

1) Shutdown all the VMs one by one.

2) Put the ESX host in maintenance mode.

3) Took the ILO/Remote console and Press F12 for Shutdown/Reboot.

4) Press option to shutdown

5) The host will shutdown the Vsphere services properly and shutdown the Host.

Your Oscar

[DL_SCI_SERVERAD]

Hi Guys,

can some one please give me the link to KB article on properly shutting down Vmware infrastructure( hosts, datastore,vcsa(virtual)). we are shutting down the SAN for power outage.

Thank you in Advance for the help.