All my VM's are on only one ESXi 7 Host Why?

[CJFBMF]

Very rookie question: Why are all my VM's only on one ESXi Host?  I have HA setup and my two ESXi hosts are part of a cluster, but I have no license for DRS yet which i dont think matters.  My question is why are or will all my VM's only start on one ESXi host?  With HA setup shouldn't I be able to restart a VM and it start back up on the other host in the cluster?

[a_p_]

Without DRS (which provides "Inital Placement"), VMs are started on the ESXi hosts on which they are registered. If you want to run a VM on the other host, you may either use vMotion (if available) to live migrate VMs to the other host, or migrate the VMs while powered off.

If all VMs are running on a single host all of a sudden, this may have been caused by a host crash, where HA kicked in, and restarted the VMs on the surviving host.

André

[scott28tt]

HA makes your VMs run in the cluster, they failover of the host they were on goes offline.

DRS is what balances load and ensures VMs can access the resources they are entitled to.

So a cluster with only HA may be totally imbalanced, so long as everything is running.