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Rohail2004
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maintenance mode question

I need to shut down 2 of my clusters and VM's running under them. Do I need to put the host under Maintenance mode before shutting them down? I am thinking to shut down all the VM's and then shut down host. any advice would be appreciated.

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Troy_Clavell
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if i disable the HA and then shut down the VM's, so how it will work out when I will bring them back online after an upgrade? those VM's will be register on a same host when they were shut down? thnx

yes, the VM's if they are powered off on your host, when the upgrade is complete, just power on all the VM's and then enable HA again in the cluster.

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AndreTheGiant
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If you want to power down the entire system, you guest shutdown the VMs and then shutdown the ESXs.

Andrea

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Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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kjb007
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Maintenance mode allows you to evacuate vm's from a host, so you can perform maintenance on said host. If you need to shutdown the entire cluster, then you have no choice but to shutdown the vm's themselves. Maintenance mode will not shutdown the vm's for you.

-KjB

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vExpert/VCP/VCAP vmwise.com / @vmwise -KjB
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lreesey-old
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I would turn off HA/DRS on the cluster, shutdown VMs and then shutdown hosts.

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Troy_Clavell
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I agree with disabling HA, especially if there is any network maintenance involved. Powering down your VM's and then putting the hosts into maintenance mode will be a good practice to follow.

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Rob_Bohmann1
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One note of caution with turning off DRS, if you are using resouce pools and want to keep the RP's and the vm's membership within them in the cluster, then it is better to change DRS to manual rather than disable it. Disabling DRS removes all the resource pools for the cluster and you will have to recreate them and move the vm's back in the proper ones. Not the end of the world but no need to create more work for yourself if you don't have to.

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Rohail2004
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one last concern,

if i disable the HA and then shut down the VM's, so how it will work out when I will bring them back online after an upgrade? those VM's will be register on a same host when they were shut down? thnx

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Troy_Clavell
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if i disable the HA and then shut down the VM's, so how it will work out when I will bring them back online after an upgrade? those VM's will be register on a same host when they were shut down? thnx

yes, the VM's if they are powered off on your host, when the upgrade is complete, just power on all the VM's and then enable HA again in the cluster.

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