VM power management values in powerType settings

[hongle]

What are the functionalities of these powerType values: soft, hard and default on power management settings of a guest VM?
Especially the value Default, which conforms to some policy setting?

Two Windows VMs experienced no automatic restart upon the ESX host starts up, and they have Hard on all settings

powerType.powerOff = "hard"
powerType.powerOn = "hard"
powerType.suspend = "hard"
powerType.reset = "hard"

Note these vSphere 4.1 VMs came from a post-V2V conversion.Do these Hard values have any bearing on the symptom?
I also read the VM tool must be present as a prerequisite. Is this so?

Thanks for comments

Hong

[AndreTheGiant]

Soft: use the VMware Tools, for example to perform a clear shutdown.

Hard: just like a power supply interruption

Default: it depends by global settings (for example in vSphere 4.x is to use a soft mode).

Andre

[hongle]

hi Andre

Thanks for your comments.

This article http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/Power-options-for-graceful-VMware-virtual-machine-power-offs discussed these values and stated  "..The default for all new virtual machines is for all power options to be set to hard..."

Additional elaboration on Soft and Hard can be found on page 11 of http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vix-api/vix110_vmrun_command.pdf although the powerType.powerOn was said on the presence or otherwise of GUI display.

I suspect "Default" is the 'optimal' value in most scenarios used with a common Tools policy.

Hong