When some virtual machines cannot run VMware Tools: Graceful shutdown of an ESXi 5.1 host and guest VMs (free edition) using the shell/command line/scripting (UPS friendly)

An interesting set of scripts from [Wayback/Archive.is] No Joke IT: Graceful shutdown of an ESXi 5.1 host and guest VMs (free edition) using the shell/command line/scripting (UPS friendly).

If all ESXi virtual machines support running of VMware Tools, then the solution is a plain /sbin/shutdown.sh && /sbin/poweroff (see [Wayback/Archive.is] No Joke IT: Shut down ESXi 5.1 guest VMs and the host (free edition) via SSH – the easy way!).

Code is in the repository at [Wayback/Archive.is] sixdimensionalarray/esxidown: A shell script to shutdown VMware ESXi host servers, with these two main files:

• [Wayback/Archive.is] esxidown/async.sh at master · sixdimensionalarray/esxidown
  

  #!/bin/sh
  # Runs a shell command asynchronously.
  
  if [ "$1" != "" ]; then
      nohup sh $1 > /dev/null 2>&1 &
  fi

• [Wayback/Archive.is] esxidown/esxidown.sh at master · sixdimensionalarray/esxidown with this interesting code fragment right before the script finishes:
  

  # exit maintenance mode immediately before server has a chance to shutdown/power off
  # NOTE: it is possible for this to fail, leaving the server in maintenance mode on reboot!
  echo "Exiting maintenance mode..."
  if [ $TEST -eq 0 ]; then
      esxcli system maintenanceMode set -e false -t 0
  fi

Note: the No Joke IT web-site has vanished, so only the [Wayback] and [Archive.is] links of it still work. The github code was still there at the time of writing.

Via: [Wayback] Solved: Read only Files – VMware Technology Network VMTN

Related: Some notes on replacing parts of a text file with template text using sed on a Busybox system.

–jeroen