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MariusRoma
Expert
Expert

Strange HA behavior

I apologize for the very basic question, but I need to understand some basic concepts about HA starting from a problem I faced some times ago.

I had a problem in a small vSphere 5 infrastructure made up by 2 ESXi 5.0 nodes.

HA is enabled and many VM are confngured to restart in case of failure of a node.

One of the 2 nodes crashed (violet screen).

While the crashed node was rebooting I noticed that the node still alive had CPU and RAM used at only 60%-70%, so there were resources to start VMs from the failed node

However, looking at the events of a typical VM on the failed node, I see the following events:

Not enough resources to failover this virtual machine. vSphere HA will retry when resources become available.

info

<date> 11:37:15

<VM_Name>

Alarm 'vSphere HA virtual machine failover failed' changed from Green to Red

info

<date> 11:37:18

<VM_Name>

Alarm 'vSphere HA virtual machine failover failed' on <VM_Name> triggered an action

info

<date> 11:37:18

<VM_Name>

Alarm 'vSphere HA virtual machine failover failed' sent email to <support email address>;

info

<date> 11:37:20

<VM_Name>

After the original nodes was rebooted, I see the following events:

Virtual machine on <host_name> is powered off

info

<date> 11:51:59

<VM_Name>

vSphere HA restarted this virtual machine

warning

<date> 11:52:33

<VM_Name>

Host is connected

info

<date> 11:54:39

<VM_Name>

Virtual machine on <host_name> is powered on

info

<date> 11:54:47

<VM_Name>

So my questions are:

  • How can I see what kind of missing resource inhibited the VM from restarting on the alive node?
  • Is it normal that, if a VM was unable to restart on the alive node, it is restarted on the original node when alive again?
  • How can I select the VM to restart first on the alive node in there are not enough resources to restart all the VMs?
  • How can I detect the overall number of VM that can be restarted on the alive node in case of the crash of a node?
  • How can I set a node to automatically reboot in case of a crash (violet screen)?

Regards

marius

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