Manage Service Power States

Access:	Views > Inventory > Infrastructure or Applications > Tree OR Virtual Machines/Virtual Services tab
Available to:	Administrator and All Operator Levels of Access Rights

To run a power command on a service, select the service in the tree and select a command from the Commands pane. You can also right-click a single service in the tree or in a table and access these commands from the Power context menu.

Power commands for VMs

The following power commands are available for VMs, depending on the VM's power state, the guest OS state and the cloud platform.

A value of N/A means that the command isn't available for a platform.

Power Commands for VMs

Power command	Virtualization Platform Details
Power command	vCenter	SCVMM	AWS	Azure	GCP
Standby Guest OS — Places the guest operating system in standby mode.	Supported with appropriately configured operating systems	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Reset Guest OS — Resets the guest operating system.	—	Shuts down the guest OS and then starts the VM	Equivalent to AWS Reboot Instance command	N/A	N/A
Shutdown Guest OS — Shuts down the guest operating system.	—	—	Equivalent to AWS Stop Instance command	—	N/A
Start VM — Powers on or resumes the VM.	—	—	—	—	—
Suspend VM — Places the VM in a suspended (or paused) state. Use when you want to free up resources on a short-term basis or put the VM on hold without stopping it (the VM must be running for the command to appear).	—	—	N/A	N/A	N/A
Reset VM — Places the VM in a non-running state and then restarts it. If supported for the cloud platform, use the Reset Guest OS command rather than the Reset VM command. Use the Reset VM command only if the VM isn't responding.	—	—	—	—	—
Stop VM — Places the VM in a non-running state. Use only if the VM isn't responding to the Shutdown Guest OS command.	—	—	—	—	Once the Stop command is issued, GCP deletes the persistent disks if this option is configured

Additional notes for AWS

You can stop and start Elastic Block Store (EBS) backed instances. You can't stop and start Instance Store backed instances (instance store root devices created from a template stored in S3); you can only terminate them. Use the Commander property Root Device Type to determine the type.
You can't run any commands on VMs or templates with the state "Unknown". VMs in an Unknown state are terminated instances that are awaiting cleanup; templates in an Unknown state are deregistered AMIs or images that are awaiting cleanup.

Power commands for databases

Use the Reboot command to reboot a database that has stopped responding. A database must have the status "available" for the Reboot command to be accessible.

Rebooting a database restarts the database engine service and applies any pending modifications to the associated parameter group. Rebooting a database results in a momentary outage of the instance, during which the database status is set to Rebooting.

Power commands for virtual services

The following power commands are available for virtual services (vCenter vApps), depending on the power state and the state of the child VMs' guest operating systems:

Power commands for virtual services

Power command	Description
Power On	Place a virtual service and its child VMs in a running state
Suspend	Place a virtual service in a suspended state when you want to free up resources on a short-term basis or put the virtual service on hold without stopping it (the virtual service must be running for the command to appear)
Shutdown	Shut down the guest operating systems for the child VMs of the virtual service
Stop	Place a virtual service and its child VMs in a non-running state. Note that it's best practice to shut down the guest OS of the child VMs of a virtual service rather than just powering off the virtual service.

Edit virtual service start order

Access:	Views > Inventory > Infrastructure or Applications > Tree OR Virtual Services tab
Available to:	Administrator and All Operator Levels of Access Rights

Service Portal users require the Power On/Off permission to edit the start order for a virtual service.

Configuring the start order of a virtual service allows you to handle startup and shutdown dependencies among its children. This command is supported only for vCenter vApps.

All children in a group are started before proceeding to the next group.
The reverse order is used for shutdown.
You can't specify delays or actions to be performed at startup and shutdown.
To configure the start order for the children of a nested virtual service, you need to edit the start order of that virtual service directly.

To edit the start order for a virtual service: Right-click the virtual service in a table or in the tree and select Edit Start Order. The command is also available in the Commands pane for the virtual service.

If you don't have permission to edit start order, you can instead select View Start Order.

Troubleshooting SCVMM VMs with a Failed power state

When a command on a VM in an SCVMM cloud account has failed, SCVMM places the VM in an invalid state, and the VM can't be started.

Commander marks these VMs with the Power State of Failed. Commander also assigns the VM a status that maps to the state assigned by SCVMM. (The Status column isn't shown by default in the Virtual Machines list; to display the Status column, right-click anywhere in the Virtual Machines table, select Pick Columns, select Status and click Add.)

To return the VM to a state where commands can be executed on it, right-click the VM and select Dismiss Failure. Commander will run the SCVMM Repair command, using the Ignore option.

If the Dismiss Failure command fails, the VM must be repaired in SCVMM instead.

See also the Power State property and the Status property.