Shutdown Guest does not work on Citrix Servers with an M: drive

As soon as you do a drive remapping of your C: drive to something else (let’s use M:), the Shutdown Guest/Suspend Guest features do not work any longer.

When you look at the vmware.log of the VM, it also already gives you some extra clues… The VMware Tools script did not run successfully.

Sep 30 10:34:54.989: vmx| TOOLS sending 'OS_Halt' (1) state change request
Sep 30 10:34:55.081: vcpu-0| Msg_Post: Error
Sep 30 10:34:55.081: vcpu-0| [msg.tools.haltFailed] The request to halt this virtual machine failed because the corresponding VMware Tools script did not run successfully. If you have configured a custom halt script in this virtual machine, please inspect it for errors; otherwise, please submit a support request.
Sep 30 10:34:55.081: vcpu-0|
Sep 30 10:34:55.081: vcpu-0| The script can be deactivated on the Power page of the virtual machine settings by unchecking "Before powering off" in the Run VMware Tools Scripts section.----------------------------------------

List HA Runtime States with PowerCLI

The HA Agent on vSphere 4.x Hosts can be in several states:

– uninitialized
– initialized
– running
– error
– agentShutdown
– nodeFailed

If you have HA Enabled on your cluster, all states except running are basically not good and requires investigation.

These states can be fetched, but to my knowledge there is no easy cmdlet available to do so… so we’ll have to dig in the SDK.