autostart vCenter VM after datacenter shutdown

[pjlandry]

Hi Guys.

I'm not about the best way to do this...

every once in a while, we need to completely power down our data center for a while during power maintenance.  (This happens, no biggie....)

In the past, I'd:

• logon to vCenter to figure out which hosts the VM was running
• shutdown all the VMs, then hosts.
• At power on, I'd login directly to the correct host and start the vCenter VM.
• Start all the other  VM's.

That's a pain.  Is there a way to automate the startup of the vCenter VM?

The cluster has 5 hosts (Esxi5, vCenter5), with HA and DRS -- so I never really know where vCenter will be -- which is Good!  I want that from DRS....

So the question is, how can I automatically start the vCenter VM, when vCenter isn't running.... 

I figure the only way would be to set a DRS rule that vCenter can only run on the specific host, and set that host to auto-start the VM....  But after some reading, I understand that host based auto-startup doesn't work when the host is in cluster...  And wouldn't the DRS rule prevent HA from starting the VM on another host if that host is down?

I was also reading on other hosts that HA would turn it on automatically...  How on Earth?  if vCenter is shutdown because the hosts are being shutdown, it's not a failure -- Why would HA start a VM that was shutdown and not dead?

Thoughts?

Thanks.

-P

[Kermitdafwog]

Hi

HA is not designed to restart a VM that has been gracefully shutdown.  I think you are on the right road though; I would try this....

Create a DRS rule to say your vCentre server *should* run on a certain host (choose whichever host you see fit).  If that host fails then HA will restart it on another host allowing continual access to vCentre.  You can then try and use the VM Startup/Shutdown properties on that particular host as the vCentre server will run on this host the vast majority of the time (unless the host has a proper hardware failure).  Move the vcentre server up the list so it sits under automatic startup

This sounds like it should work but I can't test it for you as don't have a test environment at present

Hope this helps

Kerms