There was a requirement in one of the projects to perform an unattended shutdown of multiple Virtual Machines during a planned Maintenance Window. We wrote a PowerCLI script to perform shutdown operation on multiple VMs with a delay of 20 seconds between each shutdown.

Requirements:

• PowerCLI
• PowerShell 5.1 or later
• VMware Tools on the Virtual Machines

Script:

Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -InvalidCertificateAction Ignore -Confirm:$false
Connect-VIServer “vCenter_Server_IP_Address/FQDN” -Credential (Get-Credential)
$VMs = Get-Content C:\Scripts\VMShutdown\VMList.txt
foreach ($VM in $VMs)
{
Write-Host “Initiating Guest Shutdown for VM ” + $VM -ForegroundColor DarkRed
Shutdown-VMGuest -VM $VM -Confirm:$false
Start-Sleep -Seconds “20“
}

foreach ($VM in $VMs)
{
Get-VM $VM | Select Name, PowerState | Ft -AutoSize -Wrap
}
Disconnect-VIServer -Confirm:$false

Note: Virtual Machines are shutdown gracefully and requires VMware Tools to installed on machine.

Just replace the vCenter_Server_IP_Address/FQDN, Path of File Containing VMs Name and Sleep Interval after each shutdown operation with the details of your environment. BOOM!!

Happy Scripting!!