July 22nd, 2008 
Kiwi Si 
Powering down or restarting an ESX server can be done in a couple of ways.
Via GUI
Either via the Virtual Server or Infrastructure Client interface by Right Mouse Clicking the ESX server you wish to power down (see below):
or by logging onto the ESX console with ‘root’ and running one of the following commands:
Via Command Line
Shut Down ESX
shutdown -h now – Immediately begins to shut down ESX and ‘Halt’ it.
Restart ESX
shutdown -r now – Immediately begins to shut down ESX and then ‘Restarts’ it
or
init 6 – as above
Related posts:
- How to automatically shut down VMware ESXi gracefully during power failure using an APC UPS. A Windows script to shutdown free-licensed ESXi 4 hosts that...
- VMware ESX – “Upgrading ESX 4.0 to 4.0 Update 1 on HP Proliant systems can fail or time out and leave the host in an unusable state if the host has HP Insight Management Agents running” With many of you upgrading to the recently released...
Posted in 
My name is Simon Seagrave and I am a London (UK) based Technical Architect. 
Loading ...
You guys do a nice job with the commnad structure, comes in very hand. Thanks alot, Makes my life alot easier.
[Reply]
Kiwi Si Reply:
May 15th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
Hi Al,
Thanks for the feedback – glad you found it useful.
Cheers,
Si
[Reply]
We are running ESXi 40, and one of our VM’s is not responding… don’t have access to the “console”, and when tried to do a power off (because reboot didn’t work) it just froze… now How can I do a Shutdown to one of my VM’s if not responding?
I tried: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1014165
but vmware-cmd says it is not found, and don’t know if that has something to do with the version we’re running… (VMware ESXi Version 4.0 Build 171294)
Thanks!
AC2
[Reply]
Replacing the “now” by an integer number ( like shutdown 2) will delay the shutdown this number of minutes.
[Reply]