Shutdown vs. Power Off in vCloud Director vApps.
vCloud Director is a great tool, but I feel like some people aren’t always using it in the precise way that it was designed. When you want to perform maintenance on a VM that vCD manages, you’re probably going to have to have that VM powered down. So, what do you do? You open your vApp, right click on your VM and select Power Off, right? Well, I’ve seen a lot of people do just that, but it’s not really what I’d recommend. Remember, Power Off is not Shutdown; it’s just going to perform a hard power off and your VM might have some issues after that. So, what do you do? There’s no “Shutdown” option on that Right Click menu in vCD. Since you want to keep your servers in tip-top shape, you open the VM console and then issue a command inside the guest OS (good ole “shutdown /s” anyone?). The VM goes down gracefully and you can now manage it… but the vApp might be in an interesting state: “partially running” which can prevent you from changi...