>Have you considered putting the host into maintenance mode with esxcli?
No. If all of the VMs are off and you put the host into maintenance mode, when you reboot, you come back into maintenance mode, which means that the automatic booting of VMs doesn't happen. That feature (for some of my VMs) is extremely important for me. Thus, my question.
It is clear that ESXi is *capable* of rebooting not in maintenance mode, because the vSphere client can cause it. The question is the CLI capable of triggering this.