When performing maintenance on a CVM, it is important to not treat it as a regular guest VM. This is because there are crucial services running on each CVM which need to gracefully respond when a CVM goes offline.
If you need to shutdown a CVM and are running ESXi, you might otherwise think to simply go to vCenter, right-click on the CVM, and select the “Shut Down Guest OS” option. However, that procedure will not properly shut down the CVM and allow the services to gracefully respond.
Instead, in using the cvm_shutdown script, it will first place a necessary HA route in the hypervisor, to redirect storage requests to another CVM, before shutting down the CVM. This will also allow the services to gracefully respond to the CVM being offline.
More information and options regarding this script can be found in KB 3270