Never tried myself, but I guess that won't work. I remember some scripted solution making use of PuTTY/plink, but can't find back the page right now. Maybe this helps: No Joke IT: Shut down ESXi 5.1 guest VMs and the host (free edition) via SSH - the easy way!
Here's another approach, but I'm not sure if this works with free license either: Graceful UPS shutdowns for your ESXi server with Centos | The Helpful Hacker
