Here's my scenario:
We have to make do with a group of servers with mismatched CPUs until we can go through and refresh our hardware. We need to get all of our hosts upgraded to 6.7 U1. We have a vSphere server up and running, so I was planning to attach baselines to each of the hosts, then remediate. The wrinkle is that all these servers are currently standalone. I would like to add them to an EVC enabled cluster so we can have some failover protection in place and make the hardware refresh a little easier. Since the CPUs are from different families, I know that I will have to shutdown the VMs running on hosts who have to have their CPUs nerfed before adding those hosts to the cluster
My question is this: Since a host will have to reboot anyways for the ESXi upgrade, is there any way I can keep the VMs powered off until I get the host added to the cluster? That would keep me from having to shut down the VMs twice.
Placing the host into Maintenance Mode prior to running the upgrade, and the reboot should work. This way the host will remain in Maintenance Mode after the reboot, i.e. it will not automatically start VMs.
You may instead (or in addition) consider to disable autostart for the VMs prior to upgrading the host, as the autostart is intended for stand alone host.
André
Placing the host into Maintenance Mode prior to running the upgrade, and the reboot should work. This way the host will remain in Maintenance Mode after the reboot, i.e. it will not automatically start VMs.
You may instead (or in addition) consider to disable autostart for the VMs prior to upgrading the host, as the autostart is intended for stand alone host.
André
Nice. Thanks mate!