I'm taking considerations about a few choices when implementing a 2 node HA Cluster and i want to share them with you and hear what you people do in production enviroments.

By default HA is configured not to power on a VM that does violate admission control but according to this well written article (http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/06/so-how-exactly.html) you basically won't be allowed in some cases to turn on a VM on node 2 if you already have some on node 1 because of maximum slot size and because one server is the number of host failure allowed; with a small cluster it might make sense to allow to power on VM that violate availability constraints and make sure you have a restart priority that makes sense in your enviroment.

Secondly i'm kind of concearn about the isolation response when it's set to power off (in previous versions this was the default); powering off is like hard resetting a physical server which doesn't sound that good if you have Databases running in that VM, i think shutdown vm makes more sense.

I would like to know what you people think about this.