Will VMs always autostart?

jimphreak

jimphreak

[H]ard|Gawd
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Nov 27, 2012
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I have all my VMs set to autostart in the following order pfSense -> Media Server -> Backup Server -> Torrent VM. However, my question is will they ALWAYS autostart when I reboot/power-up my ESXi host? Like if I manually shutdown my guest VM's and then reboot my ESXi host, will all of my VMs that are configured for autostart start up? Or will they only autostart upon an improper shutdown?

I manually rebooted my ESXi host today that has pfSense set to start up first on it and it seems like it never came back online (given the fact that I can no longer access it remotely and the OpenVPN connection hasn't come back online.)
 
they should start, yes, but the last time I did anything like that I let it shut them down too when I took down the host (adjust shutdown config to guest shutdown).
 
lopoetve said:
they should start, yes, but the last time I did anything like that I let it shut them down too when I took down the host (adjust shutdown config to guest shutdown).
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I did configure the shutdown config to guest shutdown and watched as it shutdown each VM one by one. Once the pfSense VM shutdown (the last one to shutdown) I lost connectivity and it hasn't come back online since. I will obviously check on this when I get home I just wanted to be sure my configuration was right.
 
jimphreak said:
I did configure the shutdown config to guest shutdown and watched as it shutdown each VM one by one. Once the pfSense VM shutdown (the last one to shutdown) I lost connectivity and it hasn't come back online since. I will obviously check on this when I get home I just wanted to be sure my configuration was right.
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If you shut down the pfSense prior to rebooting the ESXi host, then you are screwed. I always shut everything down with the exception to the firewall and then reboot the ESXi host. Then everything powers back up after the ESXi host reboots.
 
KapsZ28 said:
If you shut down the pfSense prior to rebooting the ESXi host, then you are screwed. I always shut everything down with the exception to the firewall and then reboot the ESXi host. Then everything powers back up after the ESXi host reboots.
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Why is that? You're saying I should have no shutdown config for the pfSense VM and just let it hard shutdown when I reboot my ESXi host?
 
jimphreak said:
Why is that? You're saying I should have no shutdown config for the pfSense VM and just let it hard shutdown when I reboot my ESXi host?
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Oops. Missed the part about the auto shutdown. Just read about the auto startup. I guess technically it should work. But I have always left my pfSense up and running and issued a reboot to the ESXi host with only autostart configured. And yes it hard shuts off pfSense, but I have never had an issue with it coming back online.
 
KapsZ28 said:
Oops. Missed the part about the auto shutdown. Just read about the auto startup. I guess technically it should work. But I have always left my pfSense up and running and issued a reboot to the ESXi host with only autostart configured. And yes it hard shuts off pfSense, but I have never had an issue with it coming back online.
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I didn't think it would be an issue since I have the VMware Tools package installed in pfSense but maybe it is. I'll have to look into it this evening.
 
Open VM Tools has some issues with the latest pfsense. Sometimes, the host does not detect the tools and does a hard shutdown after a timeout. You'll notice that if you try to manually shutdown or restart pfsense via the command through ESXI, ESXI will complain that the tools are not installed. Try it again and it magically works.
 
I have pfSense set to auto start, and even if I manually shut the VM down before shutting down/restarting the host, the pfSense VM will still auto start
 
The reason my VMs didn't start is because when my ESXi host rebooted it rebooted into maintenance mode. Does it do that automatically? I don't remember putting it into maintenance mode before I rebooted it but it's possible that I did.
 
Shouldn't you always put a host in to maintenance mode before shutting it down?
 
HydroBudz said:
Shouldn't you always put a host in to maintenance mode before shutting it down?
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No. It is more for servicing the server and disable automatic vMotion when using DRS. There are other reasons to use it as well that I won't get into. But if you have a single host that is running a virtual firewall and you want to reboot it remotely, then you definitely don't want it in Maintenance Mode. Otherwise your VM's will not autostart like jimphreak experienced. :D
 
KapsZ28 said:
No. It is more for servicing the server and disable automatic vMotion when using DRS. There are other reasons to use it as well that I won't get into. But if you have a single host that is running a virtual firewall and you want to reboot it remotely, then you definitely don't want it in Maintenance Mode. Otherwise your VM's will not autostart like jimphreak experienced. :D
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lopoetve said:
defeats autostart - this is generally for single hosts :)
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Lesson learned :D.
 
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