Reboot best practise

[cholthe]

We had to have a controlled shutdown off all servers due to a scheduled power cut.

This let me to think about how to best shut down Vmware servers and our 2 ESX servers.

Would it be to first shut down each and everyone one the Vmware servers, either from virutal center or from the MUI, or just shut down the ESX servers which in turn would shut down the VMvare servers as well?

 

[comtec17]

You can do it either way, there is no defined best practice. I like to shutdown my VM's first then ESX.

 

[paintballer]

As a Server Admin person, I don't like the idea of downing the Hosts before the Guests. I think that it would be fine most of the time, but that the 1% of the time that it may cause a problem, it would not be fun. If you're talking about alot of Guests, you could set up some shutdown scripts or something to help you do it faster/easier.
Of course, when you shut down the hosts you want to do it through the VI Client, or command line, not by killing power, or hitting the power button. (I'm just saying this to be thorough...)

Hope that helps,
Paintballer

 

[comtec17]

If you go onto a VMWare ESX server and do an init0 or init6, it will first shutdown the guests so it can take down the vmkernel.