Re: Power7/HMC: How to automatically start/stop VIOS with the hardware

Hello Roberto,

Am 26.03.2024 um 19:30 schrieb Roberto José Etcheverry Romero <yggdrasil.raiker@xxxxxxxxx>:

Vmware doesn't really expose the VM shutdown and startup order UNLESS you delve deep into the ESXi interface, so, for enterprise purposes, automatic shutdown or restart is not something "supported".

I don't know what you're talking about. On a single host, it's two clicks: Manage => Autostart. That's all but "deep".

And shutdown is still *default*, no matter if you tell a host to shut down or go to maintenance mode. You need to jump through a lot of hoops to not make it shut down VMs before host shutdown.

I know it because I had it configured and I wondered why it wasn't working and it turns out that doing migrations between hosts resets any automatic configuration, so now you can get the domain controllers started in the wrong order or last of all and let all of the servers run around timing out because they expected the AD up and etc.

To my limited experience, the order of individual domain controllers doesn't matter with AD. As long as at least one DC is available before subsequent VMs are started. My experience is more about Linux and the single hard dependency I've faced is DNS.

If you cluster ESXi with vCenter (the recommended way to orchestrate, multiple hosts), automatic shutdown migration is handled by the vCenter server. I don't know about startup in this scenario and I can't find something related in the vCenter UI. Besides that, startup settings on single host are local to that host. If you migrate a VM away, all configuration from that host is deleted from the source host. Not a real surprise here.

But this is all far from the scope of my initial comment: Comparing a single POWER server utilizing VIOS with a single ESXi host.

I understand what you mean

Thank you! Finally!

but it is not something that is really used for most enterprises

The world does not only consist of enterprises. Single ESXi servers are to be found in smaller shops as well as single POWER machines. Again, this is not what I was talking about.

:wq! PoC