UPDATE – I’ve had the unfortunate chance of testing this script a few times and have found that its not as efficient as it could be. If I were you I would check out my updated post Practise makes perfect! More PowerCLI APC Powerchute Network Shutdown Goodness (Now with Power On!) as it completes much faster and has a function to turn the VMs back on once power is restored. Thanks!
A few months ago, in order to prepare for the release of ESXi and vSphere 5 I went through the motions of migrating all of our ESX hosts to ESXi. I thought I had all my ducks in a row concerning all of our third party solutions that connect to our environment (Veeam, VCops, etc) but one that completely slipped my mind was our APC and vGhetto shutdown scripts that were running inside our vMA. Since our then current solution relied on the ability to ssh into the hosts and ESXi by default doesn’t have an ssh server running, the scripts proved to be somewhat, how shall I say this….useless (and yes, I found out the hard way!!). When looking for alternatives I first went to APC and was delighted to see that they finally had a version of their powerchute network shutdown available for the vMA appliance. What I found out though was that it basically peeled through your list of servers that you have connected to the vMA and shut them down accordingly, which in my case is not the answer. I have multiple ESX(i) instances connected to the vMA which reside in many different locations, so if the power failed at our main datacentre, essentially our vMA would receive the shutdown command and initiate a shutdown sequence on ESX hosts in an offsite location. So, back to the drawing board as that was definitely not the answer. I liked the way that lam??? Ghetto scripts worked originally being that you could specify which hosts and even which vMA to shut down So i decided to recreate, or at least get close too that same functionality in powershell. Below is what I came up with, and the script is very much in its infancy so if you can see some spots for improvement please let me know! Also, I don’t claim to be a powershell expert in any sort of sense so definitely don’t take this directly not production, test it in a lab first or even in comment the shutdown lines and have a look at the output. I placed the script on a windows box outside of our virtual infrastructure, so essentially the physical machine receives the shutdown command, but before shutting itself down it runs the powershell script to gracefully shutdown the virtual infrastructure (vms and hosts) first.
Anyways, here it is and if you have any suggestions , comments or questions don’t hesitate to ask. We can muddle through this together 🙂
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