In a previous post (Shutting Down a Windows Server) I looked at how you can shutdown Windows Servers in a workflow to save power. If you have already moved your workloads to a XenServer environment this task becomes a lot easier to manage. Shutting down a XenServer host is a three-step process:

1. Suspend or Shutdown any VMs that you have running on the host (with either Suspend-VM or Shutdown-VM)
2. Disable the host so new VMs cannot be started (with Disable-Host)
3. Shutdown the host (with Shutdown-Host)

To turn this process into a complete workflow we need to define the logic that determines which hosts to shutdown and what to do with the VMs running on it. For simplicity sake I have chosen to shutdown all the hosts on my server (or in my Pool if a master server is specified) and to first suspend all the VMs currently running on the host(s). Here is what the workflow looks like:

I added in the prompts so that if you download this workflow and run it you are reminded to specify your own XenServer host name, user, and password, but in reality these items would most likely be hard-coded or specified at run time dynamically. Next we are going to have to look into starting Windows Servers and XenServer hosts back up as my server room is a long walk for me.

If you want to download the workflow to try in your environment I posted it to the Script Exchange where you can also post workflows you have built. Click here to download the workflow file.