Good day all. vShere 5.0 is the focus on this one.
I have a hardened Linux VM that I wanted to restart on a weekly schedule. Looking at vSphere's Scheduled-Tasks, I see the following options (with my own interpretations of each):
Power on -- Powers on a VM
Power off -- HARD Powers off a VM with no logic sent to the VM
Shut down -- Soft shutdown attempted with VMware or 3rd party tools to attempt to safely shutdown a guest OS
Suspend -- Pause the VM in its current running state
Reset -- HARD restart of the VM not warning the VM about its impending doom
Why is there a shutdown option to safely power off a VM but not an option to RESTART using the guest tools? My current work around is to create 3 tasks; one to shut down, one to power on after 1 minute, and another power on task 5 minutes later as a backup because of not knowing how long the shutdown task will take and it may run the second task before the first one finished. This could be much simpler if there was a safe RESTART option like there is already for SHUTDOWN.
Did I miss something? Please let me know. Thanks. (keep in mind that this box is hardened and vendor does not want us to edit anything on the VM at all - thus the reason that I am trying to use the scheduled tasks)
Thanks in advance!!