VM restart, after restarting ESX host

[b4ndit]

dear all,

I'am using VSphere Enterprise.

Here is my short question, Does VMs always restart after we restart or shutdown the esx host ?

In esx 3.5, when I restart an esx host, all VMs in this host are still alive (without restart).

Pls advice

Thanks

[enDemand]

Hi b4ndit. There are 2 parts of the answer to your question. If you're running an ESX server in a standalone environment or if you've disabled certain VMs from any automation levels for DRS in a cluster, then YES, you can setup automatic startup/shutdown rules for those VMs registered on that ESX server. However, those settings are an ESX-level setting, not a VM setting...so if the VM migrates to another ESX server, the setting will not migrate with it. With that said, if you have a DRS/HA cluster, then one would assume that you won't have any reason to have a startup/shutdown rule for any VMs, as the cluster will keep the VM running (either by vMotioning it to another host if you put it's current host in Maintenance Mode or recovering via HA). You can define startup rules, though, with HA to customize the start order and priority of any particular VM. Part 2 of this answer relates to vApps. If you have multiple VMs setup in a vApp, you can control startup/shutdown of those VMs for when the vApp is powered on or powered off. Hope this helps.

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

The only way a Vm can remaining running when the ESX server it is running on is restarted is if FT is enabled - in this case the connections will seemlessly switch over to the 'shadow' vm. This is a vSphere feature so I can not see how you did not experience the VMs restarting on your ESX 3.5 environment - even with VMware HA there will be a short outage as the VMs will restart on the remaining nodes of the cluster -

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[b4ndit]

thank you all..

Always read the manual..:)) twice.. :smileygrin: