Properly shutting down and firing back up Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Because my Pivotal Cloud Foundry lab runs on my modest vSphere environment, every now an then I need to power something down, and I don’t always have the resources to vMotion everything to the remaining servers. So I needed a method to be able to power down the PCF lab and bring it back up. Pivotal tech support responded with these recommended instructions:

Normally, it is not necessary to power off PCF because it is providing continuous cloud service. However, if you have to power off the system or some VMs, here are the tested steps.

1. follow the backup procedures outlined at [1] to backup databases and NFS servers, this is for disaster recovery purpose.

2. confirm vSphere HA won’t automatically try to bring back VMs you shut down.

3. shutdown Ops Manager Director VM first, because it detects offline VMs and recreates them automatically.

4. shutdown Cloud Controller VM the next, this action will terminate any futher Cloud Foundry operation.

5. shutdown other VMs.

6. those VMs have VMtools installed, so you can use vSphere “Shut Down Guest” to shutdown VMs gracefully.

When you need to bring those VMs back, just follow the reverse steps above.

1. power on VMs prior to Cloud Controller and Ops Manager Director

2. power Cloud Controller

3. Ops Manager DirectorCLI help for details.