PCNS Confusion

[ebbz]

After reading documentation, and what seems like endless forum posts and articles, I am still unclear how to design a shutdown process that will serve the environment. Briefly, I have three ESX 7 Hosts, vCenter, a PCNS 4.4.3 VM appliance and large handful of VMs (all Linux or Linux-esque). About one-third of the VMs need to be shutdown via CLI in a particular order. Everything can be managed via SSH. I have about 15 minutes of runtime on the UPS and have no problems getting everything shutdown manually if I am available to jump on it...hence the need to an automated, automatic solution. What I am have the biggest problem with is understanding how to implement it. I created scripts for each of the workloads to shut them down in the user_files directory on the appliance. I cannot get a grasp on how they are triggered and in what order they are executed (serial or parallel). With the "SSH Settings", "Configure Events" and "Virtualization Settings", I am not sure how the process is ordered and timed out. I can, in fact, shutdown everything except the PCNS and the last ESX Host via SSH. What I am looking to accomplish, unless I am way off, is:  after the UPS is on battery for 30 seconds, shutdown my more critical workloads via SSH commands and power off the remaining VMs and ESX Hosts (either by SSH or VM Shutdown via vCenter) then power off the UPS. Everything can remain down and manually brought up and I do not need the hosts to go into maintenance mode (unless they need to as part of the shutdown). I just need a bunch of guidance and understanding of how it is all put together. Any suggestions, advice and knowledge transfer would be greatly appreciated.

Sorry for the long post.