Because I was using a lot of space on my local datastore disk, I decided to move the big iso folder to the QNAP using an NFS datastore. It’s not totally obvious and I refered to http://files.qnap.com/news/pressresource/product/How_to_set_up_QNAP_NAS_as_a_datastore_via_NFS_for_VMware_ESX_4.0_or_above.pdf to get it to work. The main un-obvious thing is that you need to prepend the mountpoint with /share to access the correct area on the QNAP.

To come back to the question about auto-power on of guests, having looked in an environment with several hosts, it is much clearer. Of course, every VM, regardless of it’s state has a host (something I should have known). So when the instructions say “Display the virtual machine’s host in the inventory” that makes total sense. For a given hosts, all the VMs assigned to that host are there. Selecting “properties” from the Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown panel allows you to change things around.

Incidentally, the “properties” link (and some similar ones in the vsphere client) are a bit over-engineered as my first instinct is to drag and drop the guest VMs on the first panel. That functionality would not be hard to achieve and would be much more intuitive.

The remaining question is what happens to the power settings of a guest when it migrates to another host? I can guess that the “Manual Startup” and “Any Order” properties would migrate with the VM but what if a set of guests are all set to start as number 1 on three different hosts and they all get migrated to one host…?

I guess an experiment is called for…(I only have one machine!)