Shared load on two servers transferred to a single server behavior

[bsdixoner]

If I have 2 servers acting together to host virtual machines (shared resources) and have a lot of hosts in an HA cluster, what happens if one server goes down and HA transfers the entire load to the one server? To be clear, the load was split across 2 servers before the failure, but after the failure only one server is left to support the entire load. Would VMware just stop on itself, or would it power up only the machines it could until the resources were exhausted? I plan on testing this all out, but would like to know if anyone ran into the whole situation yet.

[RParker · Accepted solution]

If I have 2 servers acting together to host virtual machines (shared resources) and have a lot of hosts in an HA cluster, what happens if one server goes down and HA transfers the entire load to the one server

Nope, ALL the VM's end up on one server, resources between servers are not shared. So that's why it reserves the amount of space on a server, in case the other server goes down, there is left over resource to adopt the rest of the VM's.

To be clear, the load was split across 2 servers before the failure, but after the failure only one server is left to support the entire load

That's what would happen.

[bsdixoner]

Thanks a lot. I figured that is what took place, but it was not clear in the VMware Availability guide.