Welcome to xen.org, home of the Xen® hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization. VMware Virtualization Software for Desktops, Servers & Virtual Machines for Public and Private Cloud Solutions. VMWare PCNS ESXi 5.0 Free License shutdown with APC PCNS 3.0.1 vMA 5 « Rebel IT. For PCNS 3.1 users please see the this comment.
If you are running ESXi 4.1 and are using vMA 4 please see here. A warning about ESXi 5.0 Update 1. There is a known issue with the autostart and autoshutdown feature for free license users. This severely impacts the ability to properly use PCNS on your VMs.