Eric Sloof(1, 2, 3) already explored the new “alarms and actions” capabilities. There’s one that really stands out in my opinion in the next release of ESX/vCenter(vSphere):
Indeed, “Enter maintenance mode“. Now you might wonder when you would want to use this. Wouldn’t it be nice that when your hardware is degraded, for instance memory status changed or hardware power changed, the host enters maintenance mode. I wouldn’t want to run virtual machines on a host that has a memory error or runs on only one power supply. Of course this action only applies to the “host” objects:
vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide
what a teasing
The action of entering maintenance mode is pretty useful, I guess you’d need to treat it with some respect though – if you lost half your power supply through a PDU outage or similar, you could suddenly have dozens or hundreds of physical servers go into maintenace mode at once.
Definitely something to play with though, will be useful in all sorts of situations.
Have you had a chance to see if the ‘Scheduled Tasks’ feature has been enhanced?