What scenarios are you/customers setting the VM restart priority to "Disabled"?

[admin]

The HA dev team would like to better understand why customers are using VM restart priority of "disabled".

Some specific questions:

1. In what scenarios are you/customers setting the VM restart priority to "Disabled"?
2. In these scenario(s), is VM/App monitoring ever enabled? Note, VM/App monitoring is turned off by default
3. If you/customers are setting restart-priority=disabled to keep a VM on a specific host, could a required VM-to-host rule be used instead? This would allow HA to restart the VM when the host comes back up after a failure.

BACKGROUND:

What is "Vm Restart Priority" setting? In a vsphere HA cluster, if a host fails and its VMs need to be restarted, the restart order can be controlled using "Vm Restart Priority"Setting. The values for this setting are: Disabled, Low, Medium (the default), and High. If you select "Disabled", vSphere HA is disabled for the virtual machine, which means that it is not restarted on other ESXi hosts if its host fails. The Disabled setting is ignored by the vSphere HA VM/Application monitoring feature since this feature protects virtual machines against operating system-level failures and not virtual machine failures.

Reference:

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-55/index.jsp#com.vmware.vsphere.avail.doc/GUID-FA8B166D-A5F5-47D3-840...

[weinstein5]

The primary reason my customers set Restart Priority is for VMs that are not business critical and do not need to restart particularly if you are concerned that there are adequate resources available for all VMs to restart -

[admin]

Thanks.

In that case, why not opt for #3 above - since the advantage of #3 over #1 is it would allow HA to automatically restart the VM when the host comes back up after a failure.

[dquintana]

Some Mission Critical is the right one, i have.

Another scenario is mixed servers, running difference services, like File servers and Print Servers or whatever.

The last one is very commong in mid size infrastructures.

Diego Quintana