Rebooting virtual machines

Managing virtual machines is getting really easy these days with all the nice graphical user interfaces available. Although, unfortunately some (most notably the VI client) are only available for Windows right now and I learned the hard way that the nice "poweroff" buttons really do that: they cut the power to the virtual machine. That results in a lengthy disk check during the next startup and can result in lost files etc. Of course, we all know that you should always shutdown a machine and not just pull the plug, but logging in to every running VM and shutting it down cleanly is not fun if you have lots of them running, and for some of them, I did not even know the root/administrator password. So, wouldn't it be nice if the "poweroff" button would do the right thing? Seems the answer to this is to make sure the VMware tools are installed and running in the guests. The ESX server sends a message to the VMware toolbox running in the guest during power state changes (before poweroff or suspend, after startup or resume).

The trick to make clean shutdowns really working under Linux is to make sure that the toolbox is running as root or else the poweroff script won't have the permission to really shutdown the machine. However, running an unknown binary as root always makes me nervous - even more so if that binary is listening on the network ports. Thankfully, VMware open sourced their tools and recently moved from Subversion to a git repository, so I will spend one day of the upcoming memorial weekend to study the code before I install it on my virtual machines.