Hosts with HA and non-HA VMs?

[saranaga]

Here is my situation...

I have 3 hosts connected to a SAN running ESXi 4.1.  2 of them are somewhat low-powered (refresh soon) and one is brand new and smoking fast.  I have all 3 in a HA cluster, with a 1 host failure monitor.

The issue is that the new host cannot come close to running the number of VMs it is capable of, because vCenter is preventing me from booting any more, since they will not survive a failure of the new host.  However, I want to make a large chunk of the new host's power reserved for non-HA servers.

I thought to make another cluster, add that host to it without HA enabled, and boot there, but vCenter allows a host to only be in one cluster, it seems.

Numbers:

1 cluster with 3 esxi 4.1 hosts with HA enabled.

2 Hosts are 4-core, 12GB servers

1 Host is 12-core, 32GB server.

I have 10 VMs that total 24GB of memory usage.  If I try to boot another, it limits me with "Insufficient Resources to satisfy configured failover level for HA."

I want 4 more VMs on the bigger host, but not have them work with HA, so if the server fails, those VMs are offline.  I want them excluded from the HA failover calculations.

Is there any way to do this?

Thanks!

[NuggetGTR]

Yeah there is a radio button under the HA setting of the cluster that says "Disable: power on vms that violate availablity constraints" select that and you can power on those machines.

*edit* you cant exclude a VM from HA but you can override the setting for the individual machines set them to restart priority to disabled, but im not sure if this excludes the machine from the availablity constraints calculations.

Cheers

[saranaga]

I have done that in the interim, and told it to disable HA on that machine, but is this the only way?

I wanted to organize my VMs into some logic to see what are HA and what aren't.  Right now I have 1 cluster, with 3 hosts and 10 VMs.  If I add one and disable it, I have to remember which are HA and which aren't or dig into a configuration tab and see which are disabled.  This doesn't seem very organized...

Plus, I would still like to use the resource monitor to keep myself from exceeding the max with another VM by accident...

And no, disabling restart priority does not remove it from the constraint calculations...

Edited to answer above edit...