ESXi 6.7 Scheduled Shutdown


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Hi Guys,

I'm running my Unraid as a VM on ESXi, and I want to be able to schedule a daily shutdown of the server.

The reason for that is that it uses quit alot of power, like about 175w when idle, and were I live 1kw costs about 0.34$ So running the server 24/7 would be almost 1.5$ a day :(

 

I can Schedule a shutdown in unraid just fine, but how do I schedule a shutdown of the ESXi. I don't have vCenter, so it is just a single host.

Is it even possible ?

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Very possible, in a variety of ways, depending on what exactly you want to do and on your personal taste.

 

To automate, you can edit the ESXi root crontab, which lives in /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root in ESXi (access it via the ESXi CLI).

There, you can add a crontab entry to do the shutdown at your designated time. Essentially, /sbin/shutdown.sh and /sbin/poweroff will do the trick.

 

Now that's not exactly what you are trying to do; you want Unraid to do an orderly shutdown, before ESXi goes down. This can be achieved via several different approaches:

 

1. If you have the VMware tools plugin installed in Unraid, and Unraid is part of the autostart VMs set, then /sbin/shutdown.sh will trigger an orderly shutdown as part of the host shutdown.

2. You can have Unraid auto-shutdown at (say) 1 am, and have ESXi auto-shutdown at (say) 1:10 am. Make sure clocks are synced...

3. You can have Unraid initiate its own shutdown and the ESXi shutdown (via SSH CLI), simultaneously.

4. You can use PowerCLI (as @StevenD just wrote while I was typing this) from a Windows host where PowerCLI is installed. You could probably trigger an Unraid shutdown, wait some time for it to complete, then do the stop-vmhost.

 

These are just examples, obviously. Hope this helps.

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8 hours ago, doron said:

Alot of good Suggestions :)

Hey Guys, thanks for the help, I think I found the solution that fits me.

 

I will get the VMware tools plugin install in Unraid.

 

Then I'll use a crontab job to initiate the shutdown.

I found a site explaining how to set up a crontab job here:

http://www.jules.fm/Logbook/files/add_cron_job_vmware.html

 

That should hopefully take care of my "problem"

 

Then I can schedule the poweroff and poweron in my smartplug :)

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