The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Since it usually is a one-off setting, I find it hard to remember how to configure the startup/shutdown behaviour of VM guests in an ESX(i)/vSphere environment.

Adding to the confusion is that this is a setting on your host, not on guest VMs.

Luckiliy, Jase McCarty and others explained this on the VMware communities, which I sligly edited:

Look under the configuration tab, at “Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown”.

Choose Properties.  You can configure the startup/shutdown here.

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In the VMware Infrastructure Client (on newer installs this is called VMware vSphere Client) I client you’ll want to select the host.

Then click on the Configuration Tab and you should see Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown.

Select that and then click on Properties (this is on the upper right corer, not intuitive).

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Hi Im using ESXi 4.0 and vSphere client, but the “Edit” button is grayed out or not active in the VM Startup/Shutdown propertiessystem settings. Is this license issue, does ESXi 4.0 doesnt support autostart of virtual machine anymore?

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Click on the Move Up button to move a virtual machine to Automatic Startup or Any Order.

The trick is twofold:

• there are 3 sections (a bit hidden in the documentation: Automatic Startup, Any Order and Manual Startup – Manual Startup is default)
• the Move Up and Move Down buttons move VM guests not only within a section, but also across sections.

Click on the screenshot below to see a larger version.

–jeroen

via VMware Communities: ESXi AutoStart virtual machines?.

Startup/Shutown behaviour is configured on the VMware ESX(i)/vSphere host, not guest