Gracefully shutting down all windows hosts

[Pmarsha1]

I have a four node cluster with many Windows guests.

It is required to update firmware and the OS on ther storage solution so all Windows guests require gracefully shutting down.

Is there an easy way of doing this? From a single point?

The same for powering back on?

I can use a windows command line utility to shut the machines down if necessary but can I do this either from an ESX host or Virtual Center?

[robert_jensen]

If you select the VM's in Virtual Center or on the ESX, and select shutdown vm, then it gets gracefully shut down.

Its only when you chose power off, that the VM will be shut down hard.

To gracefully shut down the VM, Vmware tools have to be installed and running.

To power then on, just select the VM's and select power on.

The same thing can be done using CLI, RCLI and powershell.

/Robert

[java_cat33 · Accepted solution]

If you have the VMware tools installed, select the cluster, then select the virtual machines tab - select all the VM's you want to shutdown, right click and select shutdown guest (or whatever it says) - not power off. Sorry can't be exact as I'm not near a VI Client. You can power on in a similar manner however I wouldn't recommend powering them all on at once....

[Pmarsha1]

Given there's 60 odd hosts it's still very manual.

I'm after something that can do them without the manual work

[robert_jensen]

There i something i dont undestand here.

Are all your ESX hosts in the same Virtual Center ?

Are you having both windows and Linux VM's running ?

What do you mean by "odd hosts" ?

If you cant select all your Virtual Machines using Virtual Center, i would look into powershell.

There shuld be a way to do it there.

/Robert

[Pmarsha1]

The answer was provided by java_cat33 thanks.

You can select the cluster, click the Virtual Machine tabs and select multiple VMs then right click and Shut Down Guest OS

Thanks

[jbrazio]

You could use WMI with the help of vbscripting to remote shutdown the Windows boxes, for this approach it doesn't matter if the box is virtual or physical.

[depping]

you could run a script from the ESX host with the following:

VMLIST=`vmware-cmd -l`
for config in $
do
vmware-cmd $ stop trysoft
done

this way every vm running on that host is being shutdown graceful and if that doesn't work it will be powered off.

Duncan

My virtualisation blog:

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

[bitsorbytes]

Use windows tools.....

From the command line, type 'shutdown /i'

This pops up a GUI box that lets you put in a list of all windows machines and the shutdown options. Click ok and it remotely sends a shutdown to these clients.

Watch the VC as the guest start to shutdown and power off.

[Jasemccarty]

"shutdown -i" works well.

Keep in mind, if you have Windows 2003 and Windows 2000 guests, run the command from a Windows 2003 system, to make sure you can send information for the Shutdown Event Tracker.

If you do this from a Windows 2000 box, the Windows 2003 boxes will hang, as no information is sent to the remote hosts for the Shutdown Event Tracker, and those boxes won't shutdown properly.

Jase McCarty

http://www.jasemccarty.com

Co-Author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center

(ISBN:1420070274) from Auerbach