ESXi 5.0 Update 1 Auto start VMs

As I said before there is a bug preventing autostart of the VMS after a startup of the box. Fixing this  turned out to be easy once I figured out the commands.

You can log onto the hypervisor by enabling SSH - go to configuration tab in vSphere, select security profile (in the software box) and hit properties in the services area. Enable and start SSH.

Using putty, logon by going ssh -lroot <machine> and entering your password.

Ok now you can run this command to figure out the IDs of the VMs you want to start (and the order). The ID is the first column:

vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms


Then edit the rc.local file (vim /etc/rc.local) and at the end add a series of commands to start each VM and sleep for a few seconds between commands. The command to start is

vim-cmd vmsvc/power.on <id>


So mine looks like this now:


#!/bin/sh


export PATH=/sbin:/bin

log() {
   echo "${1}"
   /bin/busybox logger init "${1}"
}


# execute all service retgistered in ${rcdir} ($1 or /etc/rc.local.d)
if [ -d "${1:-/etc/rc.local.d}" ] ; then
   for filename in $(find "${1:-/etc/rc.local.d}" | /bin/busybox sort) ; do
      if [ -f "${filename}" ] && [ -x "${filename}" ]; then
         log "running ${filename}"
         "${filename}"
      fi
   done
fi


vim-cmd vmsvc/power.on 3
sleep 10
vim-cmd vmsvc/power.on 4
sleep 10
vim-cmd vmsvc/power.on 6


Now when it boots it should start the VMs in the order you specified!