For whatever reason, when you want to shutdown the whole VMware Cloud infrastructure, you need to be considerate about the order of turning off VMs, Servers and equipments. Using common sense we can give a rule of thumb: first all operational, regular VMs hosted on VSphere ESX’s; of course VMs that are part of infrastructure (like SQL server) should be excluded. Then,  it’s VMware infrastructure turn and at last (but not least!) hardware equipments. To be more specific, for a regular VMware vCloud Director environment, the shutdown order would be:

1. Customers operational VMs, vApps
2. Management, Monitoring Servers
3. VMware vCloud Director (RedHat server)
4. VMware vShield Manager
5. VMware vCenter
6. DNS Server
7. Database Server (MS SQL Server)
8. ESX Hosts
9. Storages (SAN)
10. Networking

Apparently, the order of booting up the whole infrastructure is reverse; from 10 to 1. That’s it. Good luck with your maintenance or re-location!