Schedule ESX Power on?

[espi3030]

My company has a scheduled power outage in a couple of weeks, I have the power off process down. I am trying to find a way to automate/schedule the power on process, does anybody out there know of a method or way to do this? This might be one that cannot be done, but I have faith in the guru's out there. Thank you in advance.

P.S. This is to power on the ESX servers, not VM's (created scheduled tasks for those in VC)

[AWo]

-deleted-

AWo

Message was edited by: AWo

[Chris_Howard]

I'd imagine it's possible to do, depending on your hardware, through wake on lan.

This article suggests that Distributed Power Management uses wol to wake up an ESX host if resource demand dictates.

I'd start with the nic vendor of your vmkernel interface. - this article from intel provides some general background.

Good luck.

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[wgardiner]

you want to have a read about wake on lan (WOL), depends on what hardware you are running. for example here's a page on the IBM xSeries servers which shows support for ESX:

Edit: Yeh what Chris said above me

[espi3030]

We are a SUN shop, I see our servers do support WOL. But don't tell me how to configure it, this is going to be a complete outage. We are installing new generators (and stuff).

[wgardiner]

How are you managing your power are you running any APC kit or anything like that. You could script the power on with them possibly.. might be quicker to just go and hit the power button on all your physical hosts though if you are going to be at the racks anyway.

I cant help you with WOL for SUN servers...never worked with them.

[Chris_Howard · Accepted solution]

We have some Sun X4600 ESX hosts, which report as having Intel E82571eb nics.

According to this, these nics provide "Packet recognition and wake-up for LAN on motherboard applications without software configuration"

You're not going to know for sure until you try it out. I would download this , and have a play with a test server if you've got one.

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[espi3030]

Chris,

This is exactly what I was looking for, I have a test system that I will be working with throughout the day. If anyone is interested in the results, I will post them here later. Thanks all for your responses.