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Many small businesses would prefer to let their server drop on power failure than to pay even $100 for a cheap UPS. It's often difficult to convince them of the value of something like that; it's why they like ESXi. It's free, they can save a lot of cash by putting a bunch of linux servers on one machine, and then I get paid. :)

If the ESXi server experiences a power outage, it is set to come back on automatically when power is restored. What happens with the guest OS's? Ideally I would like them to all come online again as well, assuming they were on when power was lost, but I see no option for choosing this.

I don't want to yank power to the system just to try it out, of course. I'm sure someone knows what happens by default, and perhaps how to make my system to work as I would wish.

Michael Hampton
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Jeremy Holovacs
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2 Answers2

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You can set the guest virtual machines to start up in a specific or general order... This is under the Configuration -> Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown menu.

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ewwhite
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  • I think it's because you said "home". They're picky here since the site is meant to cover professional scenarios. – ewwhite Dec 09 '12 at 13:53
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    Yeah I would have expected someone to read "freelance developer and systems engineer" and realize that my home is my professional place of business. Trigger happy admins... – Jeremy Holovacs Dec 09 '12 at 13:55
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    The problem is that most "home use" scenarios aren't likely to be the same as a professional deployment - even home office use likel yourself. You mention that you don't have a UPS - that's unlikely to be the case in a professional setting, is it not? If a professional operation was worried about the availability of its virtual machines it would look into a high availability cluster, etc. – Rob Moir Dec 09 '12 at 15:46
  • @RobM, I hear what you're saying, but that really isn't true. Many small businesses would prefer to let their server drop on power failure than to pay even $100 for a cheap UPS. It's often difficult to convince them of the value of something like that; it's why they like ESXi. It's free, they can save a lot of cash by putting a bunch of linux servers on one machine, and then I get paid. :) I think the admin here is really hairsplitting. Of course, not much I can do about it except protest. – Jeremy Holovacs Dec 09 '12 at 16:28
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Per default, nothing happens. But you can set the startup behaviour for every VM to bring them up automatically:

In your vSphere Client, go to the configuration tab of the host and find "startup / shutdown of virtual machines".

mgabriel
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