Insufficient vSphere HA failover resources

[VirtualizingStu]

Hello everyone,

First let me apologize for the length of this post. I am new to the forums and have caught the VMWare "BUG"! I am preparing for my VCP test in December. I am going through the blueprint and working on HA and running into a weird issue. When attempting to put one host into maintenance mode I get the following alarm:

Insufficient vSphere HA failover resources

As we all are aware this should start the vMotion process but in my case it does not. Upon further investigation of the tasks I see Unable to automatically migrate (VM) from ESXIHost1.

HomeLab Information:

ESXI Host 1:

CPU: Xeon E3-1230v2

Memory: 32GB

ESXI Host 2:

CPU: Xeon E3-1230v2

Memory: 32GB

Storage:

Synology 1813+ (NFS & iSCSI)

Qnap 219p (iSCSI)

I attempted the following Admission Control Policy:

Host Failures the cluster tolerates: 1

Define failover capacity by reserving a percentage of the cluster resources:

CPU: 50%

Memory: 70%

With both policies I get the same error.

I have enough resources as I currently shutdown all VMs except for two, one on each host.

Also there is no CPU or Memory reservations on the VMs.

Any advise/suggestions would be appreciated as I am a bit confused as to why this shouldn’t be working.

[VirtualizingStu]

Troubleshooting done so far:

Recreated the Cluster to rule out a corrupt cluster.

Confirmed VMs don't have a reservation.

Can successfully perform a vMotion manually.

Confirmed communication between the hosts and hosts with vCenter.

[a_p_]

No matter how many resources are available on a single host, HA will not be able to work (i.e. restart VMs on another host) if only a single host remains active. In this case you'll need to temporarily disable HA.

André

[VirtualizingStu]

Its my understanding in order to use HA you must have at least two hosts, 3GB of memory or higher on each host, and shared storage. If I power off a host machine (hard shutdown) with VMs running those VMs do vMotion over to the other host. So HA is working, I am just trying to wrap my head around why I am not able to do the same thing when putting a host in maintenance mode. Which I would think would be the same as shutting it down. I have a lot to still learn but I should not need a 3rd host in order to make HA and Maintenance mode work successfully.

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - First off HA does not use  vMotion - the VMs are actually restarted on the remaining nodes and now to answer your question a hard shutdown does not check resources available for HA while Maintenance is a more controlled shutdown and will check for available resources -

I have also moved this to a more appropriate forum

[VirtualizingStu]

Thank you a.p. & weinstein5 for clearing that up for me. I appreciate the help

[a_p_]

You are welcome. Btw. unless you already did, take a look at http://www.yellow-bricks.com/vmware-high-availability-deepdiv/ which explains HA in detail.

André

[VirtualizingStu]

I ordered his book 2 days ago should come in today or tomorrow. Thanks for the link though