vSphere Availability

My infrastructure is vSphere4, with ESX 4.0 hosts.

I have a cluster comprising of five ESX 4.0 hosts with HA

enabled. There was a failure on one of the hosts and the VMs failed to be migrated from the failed host to the four working hosts.

The HA is configured as follows:

VMware HA: Enable host monitoring; Disable: Power on VMs that violate availability constraints

VM Monitoring: Enable VM monitoring is NOT checked.

What am I missing ?

Are you using a SAN or DAS for the VM's?? If SAN, are the LUNs where the VM's reside connected to all the hosts? Can you vMotion the VM's between all the hosts? What license do you have for vSphere?

VMware VCP4

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I am using SANs and they are all connected to the other hosts. VMotion works between the hosts. The license is ESX server Standard

With vSphere 4 Standard you don't get HA... You do get vMotion, which explains what's going on for you... You would need to upgrade to vSphere Advanced or above to get HA... You might get it with 4.1, if you upgrade/update to that release... You won't get FT until Advanced and above...

VMware VCP4

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On further checking, I found out that the hosts on this particular cluster is running ESX 3.5.0 Although the license is ESX Standard, we have Add Ons for HA, DRS Vmotion. I am back to square one:(

If you guys are under support (SnS) then you should have new licenses available to you on your VMware account page... You could then just download the 4.x installer and grab the products keys and go for it...

I always recommend that any company gets SnS on their VMware product licenses, since that way you'll always have licenses for the new releases without paying more. Doing one year at a time (for the SnS) makes for pretty short money to maintain your licenses, as well as have support with VMware. I've also tried both the gold and platinum service and would only go with platinum at this point... Especially when so very often we need to do things after normal business hours. Even with the slightly extended gold support hours, there have been times that I have needed to call on the weekends...

VMware VCP4

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With ESX 3.5 hosts, you will need a license server and the proper entitlements in order for HA to configure. For 3.5 the entitlement for HA begins with the characters 'DAS' and is six lines long.

-j