How can you shut down an ESXi host but leave the server powered on?

[Wasisnt]

We are having a planned building power outage Saturday night and would like to shut down our ESXi 4.1 hosts but leave the power state of the hosts on.  Then eventually the servers will shut off after the UPS drains. We are assuming the power state will be saved on the servers themselves so that when the power comes back on the hosts will boot up. That is they will act like the power button is in the on state so when the power comes back on they will fire up.

Is there a way to just shut down the VMware services and leave the server running or is it all or nothing with ESXi?

[NickMarshall9]

I'm not sure of any way of doing this "cleanly". It's the same as any other OS in that the ESX(i) is running when the server is on (after POST). You're not able to put it in a mode that is "safe to shutdown" like the Windows 95 days!

You COULD do it not cleanly by putting the hosts into maintenance mode, but then when the UPS(s) drain empty the server will go off cold, probably not a good idea, but maintenance mode would be better than letting all your VMs hard shutdown too.

About the only thing I can think of is to shut the server down as normal, and then boot it up into the BIOS (or hit the pause button when it's POSTing) and leave it there.

Any others have a better way of achieving this?

Cheers,

[chriswahl]

Sounds like more of a BIOS level concern here, as you can set it to either "restore last power state" or "power on" when power is detected. I typically have my vSphere servers set to "power on".

As far as the vSphere servers, one option may be to put them in maintenance mode prior to to the power outage.