Sometimes You want to shutdown vCSA or PSC gracefully, but You don’t have an access to GUI through vSphere Client or VAMI.

How to do it in CLI? I’m going to show You right now using dcli, because I’m exploring a potential of this tool and I can’t get enough.

1. Open an SSH session to vCSA and log in as root user.
2. Run dcli command in an interactive mode.

   dcli +i

3. Use shutdown API call, to shutdown an appliance, giving a delay value (0 means now) and a description of disk task.

   com vmware appliance shutdown poweroff --delay 0 --reason 'Shutdown now'

4. Enter an appropriate administrator user name e.g. administrator@vsphere.local and a password.
5. Decide if You want save the credentials in the credstore. You can enter ‘y’ as yes.

Wait until the appliance will go down. 🙂

I know that it’s not the quickest way, but the point is to have fun.