Shutdown of ESXi 4 with Data Recovery 1

[nathans77]

Occasionally we have planned power cuts and need to shut everything down, sometimes in a pinch. We are looking for procedures on completely shutting down an ESXi 4 with vCenter and Data Recovery in a graceful way.

Thanks

[rcporto · Accepted solution]

Just follow these steps;

1. To shutdown VDR, make sure there is no job/task running, right click on VM and select Shutdown Guest;

2. To shutdown vCenter, logon on vCenter virtual machine guest and go to Start Menu -> Shutdown;

3. To shutdown ESXi, connect to the ESXi host directly using vSphere Client and right click on host and select Shutdown.

[nathans77]

Thanks Richardson. We're still somewhat new to VMware here.

Do all the other VMs have to be shutdown first, or will those steps shut them all down?

Will the VMs try to migrate to other HA storage?

[rcporto]

Do all the other VMs have to be shutdown first, or will those steps shut them all down?

For all other VMs, just shutdown them before shutdown the vCenter Server.

Will the VMs try to migrate to other HA storage?

About HA, if you will completely shutdown your hosts, shutdown all VMs... the HA will restart VMs on another host only in case of failure of one of your hosts.