Safely Powering Down Windows 2003 Servers with Remote CLI

[sant0sk1]

Whenever I execute:

vmware-cmd <cfg> soft

Against Windows 2003 Servers, upon reboot I am greeted with the unfortunate "Shutdown Event Tracker" dialog box. You know, the one where it says "Why did the computer shut down unexpectedly?". The fact is that it did not shut down unexpectedly, but was a planned and scheduled offline backup.

Is there any way to power down Windows servers "safely" so that this message doesn't appear and a nasty error in the system event log doesn't occur?

In adjunct, is there any way to execute a command inside the guest Operating System? I would like to invoke 'tsshutdown' command to power off our terminal server if possible.

Thanks.

[sant0sk1]

bump.

Anybody have any ideas on this?

[glynnd1]

Do you have VMware tools installed within the VM?

[sant0sk1]

Yes, on all machines that I'm having this problem with.

[glynnd1]

What behaviour do you see with:

vmware-cmd /vmfs/volume/vmfslabel/VMName/VMName.vmx stop trysoft

from the ESX command line?

What do see in hte log file from the VMs directory?

[sant0sk1]

If I run vmware-cmd stop with the 'trysoft' option the server doesn't shutdown at all and the current vmware.log doesn't change at all. If I run vmware-cmd stop with the 'soft' option the machine shuts down and upon reboot I am greeted with the same dialog box.

[sant0sk1]

bump. Nobody else has this problem/concern? Any work-arounds? anything?

[ceemour · Accepted solution]

I use vmcontrol.pl myself as I had the same issue

cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware VI Remote CLI\Perl\apps\vm"

vmcontrol.pl --host fqdn_of_host --url https://ip_of_host:443/sdk/webService --username root --password esx_password --vmname name_of_vm --operation shutdown

vmcontrol.pl --host fqdn_of_host --url https://ip_of_host:443/sdk/webService --username root --password esx_password --vmname name_of_vm --operation poweron

Chris

[sant0sk1]

@ceemour

That does it, thanks!