Stopping, Rebooting, and Examining Hosts

You can stop, reboot, and examine hosts with ESXCLI or with vicfg-hostops.

Stopping and Rebooting Hosts with ESXCLI

You can shut down or reboot an ESXi host using the vSphere Web Client or vCLI commands (ESXCLI or vicfg-hostops).

Shutting down a managed host disconnects it from the vCenter Server system, but does not remove the host from the inventory. You can shut down a single host or all hosts in a data center or cluster. Specify one of the options listed in Connection Options for vCLI Host Management Commands in place of <conn_options>.

To shut down a host, run esxcli system shutdown poweroff. You must specify the --reason option and supply a reason for the shutdown. A --delay option allows you to specify a delay interval, in seconds.

To reboot a host, run system shutdown reboot. You must specify the --reason option and supply a reason for the shutdown. A --delay option allows you to specify a delay interval, in seconds.

Stopping, Rebooting, and Examining Hosts with vicfg-hostops

You can shut down or reboot an ESXi host using the vSphere Web Client, or ESXCLI or the vicfg-hostops vCLI command.

Shutting down a managed host disconnects it from the vCenter Server system, but does not remove the host from the inventory. You can shut down a single host or all hosts in a data center or cluster. Specify one of the options listed in Connection Options for vCLI Host Management Commands in place of <conn_options>.

■	Single host. Run vicfg-hostops with --operation shutdown.

■	If the host is in maintenance mode, run the command without the --force option.

vicfg-hostops <conn_options> --operation shutdown

■	If the host is not in maintenance mode, use --force to shut down the host and all running virtual machines.

vicfg-hostops <conn_options> --operation shutdown --force

■	All hosts in data center or cluster. To shut down all hosts in a cluster or data center, specify --cluster or --datacenter.

vicfg-hostops <conn_options> --operation shutdown --cluster <my_cluster>

vicfg-hostops <conn_options> --operation shutdown --datacenter <my_datacenter>

You can reboot a single host or all hosts in a data center or cluster.

■	Single host. Run vicfg-hostops with --operation reboot.

■	If the host is in maintenance mode, run the command without the --force option.

vicfg-hostops <conn_options> --operation reboot

■	If the host is not in maintenance mode, use --force to shut down the host and all running virtual machines.

vicfg-hostops <conn_options> --operation reboot --force

■	All hosts in data center or cluster. You can specify --cluster or --datacenter to reboot all hosts in a cluster or data center.

vicfg-hostops <conn_options> --operation reboot --cluster <my_cluster>

vicfg-hostops <conn_options> --operation reboot --datacenter <my_datacenter>

You can display information about a host by running vicfg-hostops with --operation info.

vicfg-hostops <conn_options> --operation info

The command returns the host name, manufacturer, model, processor type, CPU cores, memory capacity, and boot time. The command also returns whether vMotion is enabled and whether the host is in maintenance mode.