I believe I'm correct in saying that there is no built-in way to configure auto startup of virtual machines if they've been gracefully powered down due a power outage when HA is enabled in a vSphere 6 cluster. Can somebody please explain why in the world this functionality isn't available? I can use APC appliances to shutdown everything gracefully when one of my clients loses power at 2:00 AM on a Sunday morning and I can configure their HP servers to auto power on once the power comes back but I don't have a way to tell VMware to turn all the VMs on again? Mind boggling. At a minimum I would think it would be possible to set a flag on the master ESX host in a cluster to say, "hey, here's a log entry that says a shutdown was initiated because we didn't have power but now that we're all turned on again I guess we can startup the VMs now." How are people dealing with this? And why are we forced to create hacks to solve such a basic problem?
I do truly hope I'm just missing something simple here. Thanks in advance for any thoughts on this.