I'd like to break an unnecessary dependency loop (without buying new hardware).

I have a Unity 300 that has both iSCSI-based VMWare datastores and a CIFS NAS server.    The NAS server is joined to an Active Directory  domain.  The domain controllers are virtual machines that use the VMWare datastores.  The NAS server is on the same (default) VLan as the management interface. iSCSI runs on a different VLAN.

This may not be the most optimal configuration but that's the way it is.   It works great most of the time, except on the rare occasions I have to shut down the whole system and later bring it back up (in this case, the Unity had to be moved within the rack)..   

Because the domain controllers/DNS servers (being VMs) have to be shut down first, the NAS server immediately starts emitting events that it can't reach them.  This continues until the storage system is shut down.

When starting everything back up, I can't start the domain controllers until I start the virtual hosts, and I can't start those until the VMWare datastores are available.  So first, the Unity has to start.  The iSCSI LUNs did not become available to the virtual environment for an hour and a half!  (that's something I already have a support case open for).

All the while the NAS server (which started right up) was emitting the same events about not reaching the domain controllers.

It would help a lot if I could manually shut down just the NAS server before bringing the rest of the storage system down, and later start it up  manually after the virtual environment is back up.