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Chaton
Contributor
Contributor

VM powered on by DRS

Hello,

I have seen something I had never seen before: DRS powered on a VM that has been

powered off for days. I checked the tasks and it was DRS that powered

the VM on, not a user. It looks like DRS needed to migrate it to

another host, so it moved it and then powered it on. I have never seen

this behavior before. Just curious if you have seen this or have an

explanation. Thanks!

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4 Replies
marcelo_soares
Champion
Champion

How did you find out it was the DRS? I really never seen this...

Marcelo Soares

VMWare Certified Professional 310/410

Technical Support Engineer

Globant Argentina

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Marcelo Soares
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weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

DRS will not power on a VM by itself - it will however start a VM on any node in the DRS cluster when it is powered on - depnding on the configuration of DRS if it is Fully Manual then the user selects which host to start it on - if it configured for Partially Automated or Fully Auotmated DRS will start the VM on the host with the most available resources - so I would look for whoever powered on the VM -

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vmjoe
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I experienced the same phenomenon (without the VM being migrated before) on ESXi 5.1/vCenter 5.1 enivronment. The VM seems to be suddenly powered on, and the only thing the task and event logs reveal is, that "DRS powered On" the VM. The task itself is "Initiated by System", the "related events" do NOT show a task by a user (could be considered a bug).

On datacenter level, select "Show datacenter entries" instead of "Show all entries" and search for the same date and time. There should be a task "Initialize powering On" initiated by the actual user. There's no reference to the VM, the target is the datacenter. So the only correlation is the time stamp!

Make sure the list size in vSphere client is set to the maximum: Edit -> Client Settings -> Lists -> Page size: 1000 (the maximum).

VMBoy79
Contributor
Contributor

@vmjoe,

Yeah it is correct. The Powered on events actually get triggered under the Datacenter not at cluster or VM level. DRS put the VM to the correct host under the cluster once the VM gets powered up.

info      <Time Stamp>                                       VM(******) on host (*******)  in datacenter (******) is starting

info     <Time Stamp>                                        Task: Power On virtual machine

info    <Time Stamp>                    <Username> Task: Initialize powering On