Ubuntu display warning before shutdown over ssh

If you can get to a place where you can use dpkg as root, you can run dpkg --configure -a

However, you might find that explodes for a borked dist-upgrade, so you might need:

dpkg --configure -a --abort-after=99999

If you use shutdown -h now, it will shut down immediatly regardless of "default settings" since you override those with the parameter.

That being said, last time we shut down our environment we did each VM seperately, waited until they all showed as powered off, and then shutdown the host (ESXi in this case). This allows you to check for errors during shutdown of the VM's, and in our case shutdown the webservers and THEN the database servers of a specific application to avoid any errors.

We do the same when starting up, and again make sure there's no errors.

I think it's important to figure out a proper shutdown and startup procedure in the case of production environments.

That being said, I think you will need to supply more information on what VM's they are. I think VMware Server won't be able to tell the difference between a shutdown with errors and one without.

P.S. why not use ESXi to begin with?