Shutting down an ESXi host remotely?

[danswartz]

So I have an APC SmartUPS on a pbx. I want the ESXi host (with 6 or so VMs) to monitor it and shutdown on AC loss for too long. Can't seem to install UPS software on the host itself, so googled and came up with idea of install VMA on a VM and installing apcupsd on that RHEL VM, checking the UPS via tcp connection to the pbx. The script /sbin/shutdown.sh on the hypervisor does exactly what I want (since autostart/stop is enabled, running this will supposedly shut down all VMs and then the host), except there is no obvious way I can see to run that command using the VI toolset. So then more google, and I am reading that I should use hostops.pl with the shutdown command and the force option to tell it 'yeah i know about the running VMs but do it anyway!' I found at least one claim that '-force' would fix the complaint that there are one or more VMs still running, but not true. I assume I am missing something here? Thanks for any ideas...

 

[lopoetve]

don't know about hostops.pl, but the vMA has ssh, and so does esxi...

 

[danswartz]

Yeah, what I have confirmed works is to ssh to the hypervisor directly and run that script, but that requires ssh keys on the esxi host. Was hoping to avoid that, but maybe not