Why do shutdown -h and shutdown -r behave so differently?

[jlixfeld]

I have a Fedora 8 box running as vmware host. It seems that if I run shutdown -r (or reboot), it causes vmware and it's guests to come down rather ungracefully. The vmware init script is called, but it just seems to kill the guest processes without waiting for the guests to shutdown first.

shutdown -h behaves very differently - the init script is called, but this time it patiently waits for the guests to shut themselves down before it proceeds to kill all the vmware processes and interfaces.

The problem is that this server lives in a colo, so shutdown -h isn't a good command to run if you're not close to the power button to turn the server back on afterwards.

So the question is why are shutdown -h and shutdown -r so different and is there a way to get the best of both worlds - reboot my vmware host machine while gracefully taking down the guests.

[jlixfeld]

I did a little more digging and it seems that shutdown -r gracefully shuts down the guests as shutdown -h did. So it appears as though reboot is more harsh than shutdown.

The thing that still confuses me is this snippet from the reboot man page:

If halt or reboot is called when the system is not in runlevel 0 or 6,
in other words when it’s running normally, shutdown will be invoked
instead (with the -h or -r flag). For more info see the shutdown(8)
manpage.

If I'm issuing a reboot from runlevel 3, by the manual's own definition, it should call shutdown -r anyway which gracefully shuts down the guests. It apparently doesn't though. Any ideas as to why?