OK so this may seem like a stupid thing to post about but I have been out of the VMware game for a little over a year now. I have been dabbling in it a bit again as we are building a lab at work. I installed the vCenter Appliance today and I needed to shut it down to move it to a different host (No vMotion license for the work lab). I just went into the built in web client on my ESXi server that had VCSA on it and chose to shutdown the guest OS. It did power it down so when I brought it up on the other ESXi host it did not come back up as I expected it to.
Yes, I did it wrong as I had forgotten about the management interface of the VCSA, which is located at https://<vcenter FQDN or IP>:5480. Once you login as the root account for the VCSA, there is a nice SHUTDOWN button on the far right at the top. Isn’t that nice?
The moral of the story? Don’t just shutdown your VCSA from the vCenter client, use the management console on the VCSA itself to shut it down. Lesson learned!
