Hi All,
We have four node vSphere cluster with identical hosts. Cluster have 65 Shared Datastores. I can see the .vSphere-HA folder in most of the datastores and some do not have. I am confused some folder have protected list file and some datastores have host-xxxx-hb, host-xxxx-poweron files. Please note that our two heartbeat datastores have only four host-xxxx-hb and four host-xxxx-poweron files. Heartbeat datastores not having protected list file. Some datastore's .vSphere-HA shows empty. Please clarify about these files.
google would have replied with the following:
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/11/23/what-is-that-poweron-file-in-my-vsphere-ha-folder/
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/07/26/ha-architecture-series-datastore-heartbeating-35/
Anyway, nothing to worry about. These are HA internals, way of keeping track of virtual machines and there protection state. HB files are used for "datastore heartbeating".