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mseng3
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Using VMRC, how can I hard reboot a VM that has VMware Tools installed?

Recently I started installing VMware Tools on my OS deployment testing VMs, during OSD. This improves performance, but frequently, I need to hard reboot these VMs (because I don't care about the installed OS anymore).

When VMware tools is installed, the "Restart Guest" function of VMRC (and vCenter for that matter) simply trigger the Guest OS to do a soft reboot. But this is frustratingly slow.

How can I regain the ability to hard reboot a VM once VMware Tools is installed on it? I'm vaguely aware of a command that can perform these functions, using a flag for "hard" vs "soft". But I'm not sure how I  would implement that in a convenient way.

Thanks,

== Matt

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a_p_
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I can't tell you why, but it seems that it is by design that the hard options default to soft after installing VMawre Tools, and that there's no Reset, or Power Off option in addition to the soft options like in the classic vSphere Client's console.

The VMRC documentation says that you need to change the behavior in the VM's settings (Settings > Options > Power). However, that might not be what one would call convenient.

André

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a_p_
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I can't tell you why, but it seems that it is by design that the hard options default to soft after installing VMawre Tools, and that there's no Reset, or Power Off option in addition to the soft options like in the classic vSphere Client's console.

The VMRC documentation says that you need to change the behavior in the VM's settings (Settings > Options > Power). However, that might not be what one would call convenient.

André

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mseng3
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HI André, thanks for the info. Could you link the documentation you're referencing? I'm not seeing the relevant settings where you specified.

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a_p_
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It's on page 11 (bottom) of the VMware Remote Console for vSphere​ documentation.

André

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mseng3
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Thanks again. I found the settings. Originally I had incorrectly assumed that, since the settings were VM-specific settings, they would be available in the VM settings as accessed through vCenter/vSphere. This is not the case, at least, not through the Flash or HTML5 web interfaces.

The settings are in fact VM-specific, but apparently can only be accessed from the VMRC menu of the VMRC client when connected to a powered-off VM. After setting them there, the changes to the power actions do persist as expected.

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CQuartetti
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We have internal ticket 1333071 requesting that VMRC show all power options. We have not assigned this to a release.

When soft power options are default, VMRC and Player try these then fall back to hard power options if they do not work.

Workstation shows all power options by default.

VMRC/Mac shows the non-default power options when you opt-click on the Virtual Machine menu (same as Fusion Pro).

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