Secondary VM not starting in Fault-Tolerance

[deb85]

Hi,

I am new to Vmware ESXi. I am facing a problem in Fault-Tolerance.

I have two ESXi 4.1 hosts:-

Their hardware configuration are as follows:-

ESXi 1 - Dell POwerEdge R300, 2CPUs x 2.999 GHz, Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3113 @ 3.00Ghz

ESXi 2 - Dell POwerEdge R300, 4CPUs x 2.833 GHz, Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3363 @ 2.83Ghz.

I am using Openfiler as iSCSI storage.

vMotion of a VM from both the ESXi hosts worked fine for me.

But the Fault-Tolerance is creating a problem for me.

When my primary is on ESXi 1 and secondary is on ESXi 2. On Rebooting the ESXi 1 (without entering the maintainance mode) the secondary VM on ESXi 2 immediately becomes primary and when the ESXi 1 is up the secondary VM gets restart on it without any manual intervention.

But When my primary is on ESXi 2 and secondary is on ESXi 1. On Rebooting the ESXi 2 (without entering the maintainance mode) the secondary VM on ESXi 1 immediately becomes primary. Now when the ESXi 2 is up the secondary VM does not start on it. ESXi 1 shows an error that "vCenter cannot start the secondary VM. Reason: Cannot complete login to secondary host." The Virtual machine tab on the ESXi 2 shows the status of the VM as normal. But disabling and then enabling the FT on the VM starts the secondary VM on the ESXi 2.

Thanks in advance.

[deb85]

Just to add:- ESXi 1 is having 16 GB memory and ESXi 2 is having 8 GB memory. I have also set the HA admission control to "Disable : Power on VMs that violate availability constraint". HA for the VM also worked fine for me.

[deb85]

I am observing the same problem with ESX 4.1 also. Can someone please inform me if there is a way to get rid of this problem?

[chadwickking]

Just want to confirm you are following the configuration for availibility on page 39 in this guide

this hasnt changed in 4.1.

I know we ahve the logs but here is some more in depth troubleshooting:

what kind of VM?

Cheers,

Chad King

VCP-410 | Server+

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[deb85]

Thanks Chad for replying.

I am using CentOS(64 bit) as my VM.

I ran SiteSurvey on my set-up. All the tests passed but still the report says "All ESX hosts in this cluster have CPUs capable of supporting FT, but not all CPUs can be clustered together."

Is there a way to know why all CPUs can not be clustered together?