Shutting Down and Restarting Machines

With Remote Shutdown, you can either shut down and restart remote Machines immediately, or create a preconfigured task to perform shutdown or restart in the future, or schedule preconfigured tasks to be executed once or on a regular basis – this section will show you how to reach all these goals.

Performing Shutdown and Restart

The process of performing restart and shutdown operations is absolutely the same, the only difference is the initiated operation type. Let us take a closer look at this process using the shutdown operation as a reference.

To turn off remote Machines by initiating the operating system shutdown, use the Shut Down button from the Power Ribbon group on the Remote Actions page. If the Network or the All Machines view is active, the selected Machines and Collections are automatically added to the operation's Machine Queue. This action is also available from the Power group from the Home Ribbon page and the corresponding group in pop-up menus and on toolbars of the Network and All Machines views. The wizard will appear on the screen and guide you through the operation configuration process Pic 1.

When configuring a shutdown operation, you can specify the shutdown reason, define if you would like to wait for a specific period of time before performing the shutdown, choose if the notification should be displayed to a remote user and if it is allowed to cancel the shutdown. The next step is to define a set of Machines to be turned off. For the information on configuring a scope of Machines, refer to the Defining Machines to Operate section of this document. Once you are done with configuring the operation, press Finish to proceed. The shutdown operation will start automatically, and as soon as it is completed, you will be able to see the execution results in the Execution Results view.

Creating a new Shutdown or Restart Task

If you do not want to shut down or restart Machines right now, with Remote Shutdown you can create a preconfigured task to perform such power management operations in future, any time you want. To create a new Shut Down task for further execution, you should choose the New Task > Shut Down item from the Tasks area pop-up menu. For the restart tasks, use the New Task > Restart item. Alternatively you can use the New Task button from the Tasks area toolbar or the Regular Task button from the New Ribbon group on the Management contextual page from the Tasks and Schedule Tools category. The New Task wizard will appear on the screen and guide you through the process of creating a new task. Once you are done with configuring the task, press Create to create it. The newly created task will be added to the Tasks area. A created task can be executed manually any time using the Run menu item from the Tasks area or scheduled for automatic execution. Remote Shutdown will store the results for all runs of this task, and you can review all of them in the Execution Results view.

Performing Shutdown and Restart on schedule

As it has already been mentioned, with Remote Shutdown you can run a preconfigured power management task any time you want. However, manual task execution may not be convenient for you since in such a case you would always have to remember when you should perform this or that task. The scheduling engine built into Remote Shutdown can always keep this in mind for you, so that you can concentrate on your other everyday tasks.

To schedule a new Shut Down task, you should choose the Scheduled Task > Shut Down item from the New Ribbon group on the Home page. This option is also available in the Scheduling area pop-up menu and on the toolbar. Alternatively, you can select the Machines you want to turn off in the Network or the All Machines view and choose the New > Scheduled Shut Down Task menu item from the pop-up menu to initialize the Machine Queue with the selected Machines. For scheduling a new Restart task, use the Scheduled Task > Restart item from the New Ribbon group on the Home page and the appropriate items in the pop-up menu. The same way, as for Shut Down tasks, you can use the New > Scheduled Restart Task item in the pop-up menu of the Network or the All Machines view.

When scheduling a task, you can provide the operation configuration options, and specify a set of Machines to operate. Once you are done with configuring the task, press Schedule for the task to be put on schedule. The scheduled task will be added to the Scheduling area. A scheduled task is executed automatically when its start time comes. Remote Shutdown stores the results for all runs of such a task, and you can review all of them in the Execution Results view.