July 22nd, 2008 
Simon Seagrave 
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
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My name is Simon Seagrave and I am a London (UK) based Senior Technology Consultant and vSpecialist working for EMC. 
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You guys do a nice job with the commnad structure, comes in very hand. Thanks alot, Makes my life alot easier.
Hi Al,
Thanks for the feedback – glad you found it useful.
Cheers,
Si
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
Replacing the “now” by an integer number ( like shutdown 2) will delay the shutdown this number of minutes.
Hi
I am receiving the following error:
“Insufficient resources to satisfy HA failover level on cluster.”
I have two ESX hosts with errors. Would rebooting 1 or both of my hosts affect my VM’s and would my HA failover commence if this is done?
Thanks in advance.
Hi Grant,
The message “Insufficient resources to satisfy HA failover level on cluster.” means that one or more likely both of your hosts in the cluster have sufficient resource to accomodate all of the running VMs in the cluster. This is almost always down to insufficient memory to accomodate all of the VMs running on a single or remaining (depending on how many ESX/ESXi hosts there are in the cluster) host(s).
If you did reboot one of your ESX/ESXi hosts then according to the error message the remaining host’s resources cannot satisfy the requirement to also run the VMs from the failed host.
If this is a lab environment then one option is to turn of the HA resource checking option. To do this right mouse click on the ‘Cluster’ within vCenter server and select ‘Edit Settings’. Next click on ‘VMware HA’ and within the ‘Admission Control’ section – select ‘Disable: Power on VMs that violate availability constraints’. Then press ‘Ok’ to exit out.
Now HA will not check to see whether sufficient resources (eg: host memory) is available. If lack of memory is an issue, expect plenty of disk caching to happen when HA kicks in due to a failed or offline host.
Hope I understood your questions correctly and that this helps.
Cheers,
Simon
Hi simon,
Mcafee is detecting a trojan when I access this link: http://www.techhead.co.uk/useful-basic-vmware-esx-commands-1-how-to-shutdown-or-restart-esx
Detected as JS/Exploit-Packed.c
Not sure whether it is a false-positive
You might want to check.
Cheers
Hi Rich,
Thanks for letting me know. I’ve looked into it and it appears that it is McAfee being a little over enthusiastic.
Thanks again,
Simon
Thanks that was very helpful to me.
A few weeks ago I scheduled a daily shutdown at 10pm of the VMware ESX 4.1 host.
I don´t remember what or how I did it.
Now I want to cancel this command.
Do you have any idea to help me?
Thanks in advanced.
JUAN RAMÓN