Automatic power up and shutdown

[goppi]

Hi.

I'm currently testing automatic startup and shutdown of VMs whithin ESXi 4.1.

From what I found it seems that a VM is automatically shutdown on shutting down the ESXi host only when it is also set to automatically start up.

Can anybody confirm that this is true?

Personally I think this does not make really sense. IMHO a machine should always be shut down if VMware tools are installed also if it is powered on manually.

What do you think?

Cheers.

[lowteck]

• KB Article: 1008182
  

Check this kb out.

low

[goppi]

Thanks for the link to the kb article which exactly matches the problem and mentions a work around.

The question remains is this really the way it is designed to work or is it a bug. IMHO hard to believe.

Cheers.

[J1mbo]

ESXi isn't really designed to be something that's just powered on and off all the time - generally servers will run for months or years uninterrupted, and vms will be moved by vMotion for maintenance.  And in any case there is a configuration to support your requirement too as detailed in the KB.

[goppi]

J1mbo schrieb:

ESXi isn't really designed to be something that's just powered on and off all the time - generally servers will run for months or years uninterrupted

And powerloss will never happen

Then also the question arises why auto startup and shutdown is built in into VSphere at all.

[lowteck]

I am presently in the process of integrating Eaton's IntelligentPowerProtection app which runs on ESX.

It is supposed to allow the graceful shutdown of vm's and esx servers.

We have bad power at our facilities and Im tired of having my esx servers go down hard.

other UPS manufacturers have similar products/solutions.

low

[goppi]

This part I have alredy done. So now the ESXi hosts are shutdown properly when the UPS batteries are getting low.

When doing the tests yesterday I still was wondering why some of the VMs hard crash while others were shutdown gracefully.

Now I know the reason for that.

Hopefully VMware will fix this issue as it can easily beeing overlooked (you cannot see on which machines and on which host you already applied the workaround).

Cheers.

[J1mbo]

There is no reason at all why OS level agents can't be used with VMs, or indeed one OS level agent with scripted orderly shutdown of the remainder.  As a final part of that the ESX(i) hosts could be shutdown, perhaps with all VMs set to suspend/resume to catch any missed in the script (test environments for example).  So lots of options really.

Apologies if I've missed the point on this one.

[Horinius]

lowteck wrote:

• KB Article: 1008182

I've also came across the trouble that my VM's don't shutdown gracefully.  At first, I didn't understand what's wrong.  But later, with a lot of tests, I realized the problem came from ESXi but not from me!

Then I found this discussion (amongst others) and that KB article.  And now that I think of it, when I was using VMware Server 2, I had similar problem.  I think they are from the same cause.

Judging from the date of this discussion and other similar ones, this bug had existed since quite a long time.  Has VMware decided to fix this bug?  If they don't have any plan to fix it in the near future, they should have warned users whenever they enable the Allow virtual machines to start and stop automatically with the system option because this is a known bug and the consequence can be very disastrous.