Yesterday I was made aware of a new blogpost by @MichelHelderman on Twitter by my colleague @KBaggerman who refered Michel to a blogpost I wrote on enabling the VM autostart through the CLI for XenServer 6.0.
This feature is no longer available through the XenCenter GUI in XenSeerver 6.0 as it was interfering with the HA features on XenServer.
Michel provides you with a great alternative, namely the introduction of the new vApp feature for XenServer 6.0, which allows you to group VMs on a XenServer and control the automatic startup of the entire VM group. Even allowing you to set the boot order and wait time between boots.
The only setback with using the new vApp feature to group you VMs is that the vApp itself cannot be configured to automatically start when a physical XenServer Host is booted. It still requires a manual action through the GUI or CLI to start the vApp and have all VMs booted in their set order. Something we most definately want to be automated.
As there is no attribute for the vApp to configure it to auto-start, like my previous post explains for individual VMs, there are alternative ways to have a vApp be automatically started when a XenServer Host boots.
In this blogpost I have gathered some of the alternative methods to implement the auto-start feature for your VMs as I have found them on the internet.