ESX Shut Down Script

[espi3030]

Hello All,

I have a scheduled power outage coming up, I have set up in the scheduled tasks shut down(s) for my VM's. Does any one have a script that will shut down the Hosts? Or is there a way to schedule that as well? Any help on this is greatly appreciated, thank you.

[demz]

Why not just simply place the shutdown command (e.g shutdown -h now) in the crontab ?

[Texiwill · Accepted solution]

Hello,

I am not sure I would put this into crontab. Mainly because crontab is a repetitive tool, i.e. if you forget to remove it every time this cronjob fires you will reboot your system. Small things like this can ruin your day.

If you must have a timed shutdown I suggest using http://mirror.centos.org/centos/3.6/os/i386/RedHat/RPMS/at-3.1.8-60_EL3.i386.rpm The 'at' command can specify a specific time to run a job and once done, is no longer there to run. One less thing to do. CentOS 3.6 is the closest to what is running within VI3.x. The 'at' rpm is safe to install. You can secure this by using 'echo root > /etc/at.allow' which will only allow root to use the at command.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education. As well as the Virtualization Wiki at

[espi3030]

Thank you Texiwill, I have downloaded the file you mentioned. How do I go about installing it? I'm not much of a Linux guy (still learning).

[rpartmann]

Hi,

rpm -i ps: Award points if you find answers helpful. Thanks.

[avaliulin]

you can install rpm package on esx server by copying this package to esx server

(I'm using WinSCP to do that - ),

then logging in to esx server via local console or ssh,

going to the folder you saved rpm package to,

and running the command:

rpm -i package_name.rpm

[demz]

You're right Texiwill, 'at' is better in this case.