On this page
The power bar sits at the top of the Overview tab and again at the top of the Console tab. It shows the current Power state and offers exactly four operations. There is no reset button and no rescue mode.
The four operations
| Button | What it does | Available when |
|---|---|---|
| Boot | Starts a stopped server. | The state is Stopped |
| Shutdown | Asks the operating system inside the server to shut down cleanly, then the machine stops. | The state is Running |
| Restart | Asks the operating system inside the server to reboot cleanly. | The state is Running |
| Power off | Cuts power to the machine without telling the operating system anything. | The state is Running |
Boot, Shutdown and Restart fire on a single click with no confirmation. Power off is the only one with a confirmation dialog.
Note that Power off is offered on a running server, not on a stuck one. A server part way through a transition has the whole bar disabled, Power off included. If a graceful shutdown hangs and the state sits on Stopping, the bar stays disabled with it and there is nothing left to click. That is the point to open a support ticket.
Graceful and not graceful
Shutdown and Restart are graceful. They send an ACPI power request to the guest, which is the same signal a physical power button sends, and the operating system decides what to do with it: flush its disks, close its databases, stop its services, then halt or come back up.
Because the guest decides, a graceful request can be ignored. A kernel panic, a hung filesystem, or a service refusing to stop will leave the server sitting in Stopping or Restarting and never finishing. Nothing in the panel escalates to a force-off on your behalf. If a graceful request has clearly stalled, Power off is the fallback.
Power off is not graceful. It stops the virtual machine where it stands. Nothing inside the server is told, so nothing gets a chance to write out what it was holding in memory.
What the confirmation actually means
The toast that appears after a click confirms that the host accepted your request, not that the server finished carrying it out:
- Boot shows "Server booting…"
- Shutdown shows "Shutdown signal sent."
- Restart shows "Restarting…"
- Power off shows "Force power-off sent."
The real answer is the Power state on the power bar, which reads Running, Stopped, Starting, Stopping, Restarting, Paused or Suspended. It is polled every 15 seconds, so give it that long to catch up before assuming a request went nowhere.
When the buttons are greyed out
Only Running and Stopped count as settled states. While the server is in transition the whole bar is disabled and a chip appears naming the operation in flight: Booting…, Shutting down…, Restarting… or Powering off…. That is normal and it clears when the server reaches a resting state.
The bar is also disabled when the state is Paused, Suspended or unknown, with the chip reading Working…. This is the case a customer misreads most often: nothing is in flight, the server is not in a state the power bar can act on at all.
Separately, if the service itself is suspended or ended, the buttons still look clickable but every one of them fails. You get a red toast carrying the reason rather than a disabled button, and an amber banner above explains it: "This service is suspended. Settle any overdue invoices to restore server controls."
No one is recorded as having done it
Power actions are not written to the activity log. Boot, Shutdown, Restart and Power off leave no entry anywhere in the panel, so there is no history of who restarted a server or when. If two people have access to the same account, the panel cannot tell you which of them rebooted it.
If you need that trail, keep it inside the server. The operating system's own logs record shutdowns and reboots as the guest saw them, which also distinguishes a clean shutdown from a power cut.