Shut down all VMs on ESXi

[kralijir]

Hello,

I am new in vSphere administration. I would like to restart our ESXi servers due to updates, but I read that you should shut down all VMs that are on it. Do you have a better solution to do that then shut down VMs one by one? I would expect a powershell script but I did not find any so far.

Thank you

[JLackman · Accepted solution]

Kralijir, you can do that from the GUI console.

In the left pane, select the ESX host.

In the right pane, click on the "virtual machines" tab. Now, you can bulk select all of the VMs there, and simply right click to shut them all down, or make any other bulk changes.

Some changes via bulk selection require all VMs to be in the same state; Powered Off, Powered On, etc.

If this works for you, please mark this reply as the "answer".

[AdilArif]

Hi Kralijir,

I understand your concern for not shutting down the VMs, as that would require downtime.

My suggestion would be see if you have enough resources to migrate all the VMs on the ESXi host to other hosts within the infrastructure. If yes, then you will have to migrate those VM's first.

Then put the host in maintenance mode and shutdown.

You can do use to method to update all the ESXi servers one by one.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Adil Arif