Scheduling VMWare ESXi 4.1 VM Restart

Question

We had a virtual machine running on a VMWare Server host on Windows Server 2003.

The machine is set up with non persistent disks.

We had a windows task schedule set up that ran a batch file to reset the machine each week so that it returned to it's original state.

The batch file that we had running was:

"C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Server\vmware-cmd" "C:\Virtual Machines\VirtualMachineName\VirtualMachineName.vmx" stop hard
"C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Server\vmware-cmd" "C:\Virtual Machines\VirtualMachineName\VirtualMachineName1.vmx" start

We have since migrated this machine to the free version of ESXi 4.1.

Can anyone let me know if and how it is possible to schedule such a restart?

Answer 1

• enabled ssh access to your ESXi
• add cron job to the root crontab(/var/spool/cron/crontabs/root)

You can start, reboot, stop, and suspend virtual machines using vmware-cmd:

vmware-cmd -H <vc_system> -U <user> -P <password> --vihost <esx_host>
/vmfs/volumes/Storage2/testvm/testvm.vmx stop soft
vmware-cmd -H <vc_system> -U <user> -P <password> --vihost <esx_host>
/vmfs/volumes/Storage2/testvm/testvm.vmx start soft

Answer 2

If you haven't already done it you will need to enable ssh access on your ESXi host.

Once you have done that you can then put vmware-cmd commands in a script and run them from cron e.g.

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/vmware-cmd "Centos 5" stop hard
sleep 30
/usr/bin/vmware-cmd "Centos 5" start

would stop and then start the machine "Centos 5" on the current host.

Put this in the root crontab

30 1 * * 0 /path/to/restart-script

and you should be good to go.

Edit:

As chopper3 notes the crontab is not persistent across reboots so you will need to edit /etc/local file and add commands to recreate the root crontab e.g.

/bin/kill $(cat /var/run/crond.pid)
/bin/echo "30 1 * * 0 /path/to/restart-script" >>/var/spool/cron/crontabs/root
/bin/busybox crond

Answer 3

Could you also perhaps schedule a reboot within the virtual machine itself? Whether it is a Linux or a Windows VM you should be able to use cron or Task Scheduler inside the guest to perform the scheduled reboot.