I just recently set up my first VMWare ESXi machine at home. I wanted a dedicated virtualization host to test various setups and configurations easily.

Once I had several guests setup and installed, one of the first things that I wanted to do was make sure that the important guest VM’s started up automatically when the host machine is booted or re-started (either on purpose or accidentally)

After digging around a bit, here are the instructions to set this up. Part of the process is not as intuative as I would have thought, so I wrote up the instructions in case someone else was looking for help

1) Open vSphere client and connect to your host

2) Next, select your host and click the Configuration tab
3) Under the Software pane on the left side, click on Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown

4) Here’s where it get’s interesting. See all the Disabled labels under the Startup column? We need to switch this to enabled. First click on the Properties… link on the top right of the list.

5) To enable automatic startup, check the Allow virtual machines to start and stop automatically with the system

6) This is where I struggled for a couple seconds. I thought you would be able to set the starup type for each machine by clicking in the Startup column or selecting a machine and clicking Edit… Unfortunatly, that is not how it works and the Edit button remains disabled until the machine is set up to automatically start.

To get a machine to start up automatically and the be able to edit the machine’s startup settings, you must select a virtual guest and click the Move Up button until the machine is under the Automatic Startup group.

7) Click OK and you’re done

There you go. Now when the host machine is restarted, both my Ubuntu Linux and Oracle Enterprise Linux servers will start up automatically, in the order listed above. To keep resource demands in check you can also set up specific delays to stagger your guest start ups.