I didn’t know this was possible. But you can easily check via the COS if autostarting of VM’s in enabled or not according to this KB article:
- Log in as root to your ESX host with SSH.
- Open the /etc/vmware/hostd/vmAutoStart.xml file in text editor.
- Search for a line that reads:
<enabled>true</enabled>
- If you find the line, the functionality is enabled. If you do not find the line, the functionality is disabled.
- If you want to disable autostart for all virtual machines on the host, remove the line.
- If you want to enable the functionality, add the line immediately after the line ending with:
- Save your changes and exit.
- Restart the management agents on the ESX host:
service mgmt-vmware restart
<dynamicProperty>