vm-vm affinity rule not performing as expected

[rrz2012]

Dear Gurus,

I have raised a Priority 2 ticket for this issue but its appalling to see that my support request takes time to give me a call.

I made that statement because I love VMware and its products, so dont just drop the ball when it comes to customer service.

Leaving that aside, I will post my question.

The cluster I manage has 5 physical hosts a vCenter Appliance running as a VM backed by a Oracle Database.

The setup was on Initial release of 5.1.

There was a vm-vm affinity rule to keep 6 virtual machines together at any given time on the same physical host.

It was working perfectly fine up until I was forced to upgrade my VI Infrastructure to 5.1 Update 2 and the VCSA's to 5.5 update 1 and SRM to 5.5.1.

Before the upgrade when I vMotion one vm from those 6 vm's it moves others also, but now it doesnt.

Seeking your invaluable advice.

Cheers!

RRZ

[vThinkBeyondVM]

Hi Friend,

  VM-VM affinity rule by design is soft. It is mean that when user migrate any VM himself, VM should migrate by violating . Also, when DRS needs any of VMs from that host to other host in order to balance the cpu/memory load, it can go ahead and do it. It will not be restricted due to VM-Vm affinity rule.

In your case, as you said, earlier (on old setup), you were able to migrate the VM but after upgrading it is not getting migrated, then it can be a bug.

However, my suggestion is to check once again your DRS rules setting, make sure the VM that you are going to migrate is part of any other hard (must ) rule. if it is, then its expected.

Can you please share the build number that you have on current setup ? 1. ESXi build number ..2. VCVA (linux VC)?

Did you upgrade ESXi as well as VC OR it was fresh install ? Plz clarify.

I may try similar on new versions that you have specified.

[CedricAnto]

Did you run into this ?

"If you use the vSphere HA Specify Failover Hosts admission control policy and designate multiple failover hosts, VM-VM affinity rules are not supported."

[CedricAnto]

About your support experience, If incase you raised the support request off business hours(presuming this,  since this post is on a weekend), you may be contacted during business hours(weekend support has skeletal staffing and supporting production outages) otherwise you may need to escalate to get appropriate attention.

[vThinkBeyondVM]

In addition to my earlier comment, just I wanted to highlight that HA is not aware of VM-VM affinity rule. At the moment, HA is only aware of VM-Host must rules.

Also when you migrate the VM from that 6 Vms, did you get any fault generated when it was not allowing to migrate or any error message?

To check DRS fault :From web client : Cluster>>monitor>>fault.

Your answer to my both comments will be useful for further root causing.

[john23]

Please check the affinity rule.. I have also done the same scenario which you mentioned, but not faced any issue.

[rrz2012]

Hope below screenshots will answer the queries

Previous setup was on initial release and build of 5.1. Since we faced a PSOD with regards to E1000 cards we were advised by the VMware GSS to upgrade the servers and vCenter server. So we upgraded the hosts to 5.1 update 2 and vCenter Servers to 5.5 update 1.

ESXi was a fresh install and VC was an inplace upgrade.

ESXi version and build number

vCenter Server Appliance version and build number

Admission control policy

DRS Setting

Thanks,

RRZ

[homerzzz]

As the above replies pointed out, please check your rules settings:

Soft...

Hard...

[rrz2012]

Thanks let me try that....