I've noticed that shutting down or restarting my server takes a very long time. Over five minutes is not uncommon. The only thing I can to blame is VMWare Server (1.0.3) which has a running guest while I shutdown the host. It turned out that after the server comes online again, the guest has been shut down gracefully, which explains the long shutdown-time for the host.
Two questions here:
1) During shutdown, how can I make the host suspend running guests, rather than shutting them down?
2) How can I tell the server to resume suspended-because-of-shutdown guests when the server comes back online?