Scripting the Shutdown ESXi host

[Stuart_C]

So work have decided to schedule major works for a time over the Christmas holidays when work is officaily Closed.

 

As neither me or the other half are particulalry keen on the idea of me coming in to shut everything off gracefully I was wondering, is there a way to script/time the shutdown of my VMWare hosts? I'll be setting the servers to switch off (Scheduled tasks) but shutting down by not sure about how to time and script the shutdown of the vmware hosts themselves.

 

Any suggestions? We are running esxi 5.1 with vcenter.

[Gatt]

Open ports 443 and 902 (remap if needed of course!) and install vSphere at home, should then be able to connect in and shut the lot down?

Check that your guests are set to shutdown or Pause when the Host shuts down... (I don't have vCenter, but for me its Host> Configuration Tab > Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown)

 

(probably easier than scripting the lot..)