Typically triggered through Virtual Machine Manager or custom scripts. Maintenance mode for a virtual machine allows you to halt a host anytime you need to perform maintenance tasks on the physical host, such as applying security updates or replacing hardware on the physical host computer. If you have not Virtual Machine Manager, you can put the node in pause to trigger the draining mode which move all resources associated to the host. With VMM 2016, You can place Hyper-V hosts andVMware ESX hosts that are managed by VMM into maintenance mode.

If you have not VMM, you can change the node to pause state and drain node role (VM, storage and so on). When using VMM, the maintenance mode change the node state to pause also. The advantage of using VMM is that the maintenance mode is also set in Operations Manager to avoid to raise alerts.