Thanks for the response. We migrated from LabManager which had this feature. I understand vCD is CIvApp based, but I would have thought a simple feature such as a 1 click solution to "Shutdown only guest VM's" would be possible from the GUI?
"Otherwise, you have to perform actions on the individual VMs instead of the entire vApp."
This would be ok if vCloud Director displayed all 50 VM's on a page, but currently it only displays 22. So the process is not 1 click, its: select all, power off, next page, select all, power off, next page etc....
"if this matters, why not just enable the ability to keep the external IP consistent."
There are a few reason why we do not use statically assigned external IP's, but the main reason is our custom in-house software built around the functionality. Secondly we rip and replace far to often to cater for static external IP's without heavily investing time into VMWare Orchestrator or PowerCLI.
Is there a specific reason VMWare does not want us to keep the CIvApp running but with the Guest VM's shutdown?