VM Turn on automatically, How? 3

[danramirez]

Hi Guys,

We Have 5.0 ESXi Hypervisor with 3 Virtual Machines. One of the is our Corporate Firewall (Virtual Fortigate).

It has happened that electricity sometimes is removed by the building guys for maintenance. How do we make our VM to turn ON Automatically.

Currently we have to log into VMware locally and turn VM on.

Regards,

Daniel

 

[baddos]

You can set the boot priority order under the configuration of your host.

In the vSphere client, click on the host computer. Then click on the configuration tab. Depending upon the version, it may look different but the settings will be found in the VM startup/shutdown section.

 

[ArizonaGeek]

In the vShpere Client click on your host. Click the Configuration Tab. Click Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown. In the upper right corner click Properties. Click the check mark for Allow virtual machines to start and stop automatically with the system. There you can set select the specific order machines boot. Since we have killer hosts I set the delay for start up and shutdown to 10 seconds.

Also, for a shutdown action by default it is set to Power Off, this liken to pulling the power cored, you will want to change that to Guest Shutdown. That will allow the guest to shutdown gracefully in the event of a shutdown event.

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_running_poweroff_vs_shutdown.html

Hope that helps.

Cheers
Rob

The answer is always "PEBKAC!

 

[ArizonaGeek]

And boy I should spell check when I answer these while on a conference call!

Whew!

The answer is always "PEBKAC!

 

[danramirez]

ArizonaGeek,

I followed what you seggested but it didn't work... I noted that under column "Startup" all VMs are Disabled, and whatever Startup Order I choose is ignored after clicking OK. Also, the "Edit..." button is grayed out.

Any ideas...?

Regards,

Daniel

 

[Provogeek]

Rob's direction are correct, you need to set the start up order for it to work.

In the vShpere Client click on your host. Click the Configuration Tab. Click Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown. In the upper right corner click Properties.

At this point, you should have a window open titled "Virtual Machine Startup and Shutdown"

Click the check mark for Allow virtual machines to start and stop automatically with the system.

This window has two sections in it, the check box is in the section titled "System Settings". Here you will want to tune your virtual machine startup delay and the shutdown delay.

There you can set select the specific order machines boot.

Now you should be in the section titled "Startup Order" All three of your virtual machines should be listed in the window just below "Startup Order". You will also see there are three levels. Level one would be Automatic Startup, level two is Any Order, and Level three is Manual Startup. By default, all virtual machines are in Manual Startup. Select a virtual machine in the list, then notice the buttons on the right become active. You have Move Up, Move Down, and Edit. Click the Move Up button to bring the virtual machine to the Automatic Startup level. You can do that for all three and the order the virtual machines are listed is the order they will start up in. Select the virtual machine and click the edit button to alter the behavior of the start up.

Keep in mind, placing machines in the Any Order level means just that. If you make your startup delay to short, you can make VM's take longer to become usable (to many VM's booting at the same time can slow things down). You don't have much to worry with only three virtual machines, but as the system grows it can be a problem. Rob gets away with a 10second delay because he has a good system, and he tested it first ( at least I assume he knows what he's doing from reading his posts in the forums over the years ). So test and tune for the system you have, don't set and go production.

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Brent Schmidt Senior Network Engineer
Keep IT Simple[/color red]

http://www.kiscc.com

Novell Platinum Partner Microsoft Gold Partner
VMWare Enterprise Partner Citrix Gold Partner

 

[danramirez]

Ooops, I hadn't moved my VMs up to the "Automatic Startup".Thanks a lot ProvoGeek.

Regards,

Daniel