Esx Patching. "VM Shutdown"

[RyanWI]

It's been a long day and a late night so far and I'm just contemplating odd things.

So, dumb question: When an ESX patch calls out "VM Shutdown & Host Reboot" as system impact, do they really mean shutdown (aka power off) of the VM? Or is that specifically refering to VMware tools needing to be installed which requires in essence, a warm reboot of the VM. I've run into a few scenarios lately where the .vmx file of particular VMs needs to be updated and, for whatever reason, can't be done while powered on. I've been running about 400VMs for the last year and I can honestly say, with VMotion and Storage VMotion, can't belive more than 50 of them have actually been actually powered off (EX: Ram/CPU increase), even though we patch our windows environment every month which almost always requires a reboot.

Fun stuff like this keeps me up at night

[Troy_Clavell · Accepted solution]

It's been a long day and a late night so far and I'm just contemplating odd things.

So, dumb question: When an ESX patch calls out "VM Shutdown & Host Reboot" as system impact, do they really mean shutdown (aka power off) of the VM?

Host reboot means the ESX host must be rebooted after the patch is installed.

VM Shutdown means in order to patch your ESX Host any VM's on the host must be shutdown or migrated off prior to patching.