auto start VMs in HA cluster

[big_vern]

Hi,

we have 3 ESX hosts (3.0.2) in an HA/DRS cluster, I know that if we power of one of the hosts the vms start on the others

My query is that we are going to shut down the entire cluster (all 3 hosts), we will manually power of the vms before doing this.

How do we get the VMs that were powered on to auto start when the cluster comes back up or do we have do it manually, I know there is the option "allow virtual machines to start and stop automatically with the system" for individual ESX hosts but don't think this applies with ESX clusters (for a start the setting is lost if a VM is vmotioned)

cheers guys and galls.

[Chamon]

Are the start up and shutdown settings the same on all of the hosts?

If you disable HA on the cluster before you power any of them down none of them will be restarted on other hosts. You will also not lose any advanced HA configs you might have. They will be there when you re enable HA after you are all finished.

[big_vern]

If you mean the settings in HA, then they are different, (low medium and high).

It's someone who isn't that familiar with ESX, so I don't really want to disable HA.

I'm not bothered whcih hosts they start on as long as they start,

Will they start themselves ?

[Chamon]

Disabeling HA or reconfiguring for HA is something you will probably end up doing more then once. I was talking about changing Isolation time and adding a second isolation address for the Advanced HA config. With the option that you have set they should start. What is the delay time that you have for them to start with?

[big_vern]

Ok, maybe I'm not being clear.

I am NOT using the "virtual machine start up and shutdown option" within the "configuration" tab for each individual host, for these reasons

1)because having this activated can mean the vms shut down if you run "service vmware-mgmt restart" at the service console

2)the settings are lost anyway when vms are vmotioned

3)I am not sure if the cluster itself will auto start them

so bearing that in mind, will the vms auto start given the scenario of shutting them down as explained in the first post

[Chamon]

If nothing is configured to start them unless you have a script to start them from the SC then I do not know how they would just start on their own.

vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/LUN/vm/vm.vmx start

You could us a script with this comand in it for each vm and start them all this way. I am not very good with the scripting so I would do this the hard way with a line for each vm.

To get the path run

vmware-cmd -l

This will give you the path to the vmx file for each vm that is registered to that host. Then you could copy and past it into your script. There may be others with a better way but I hope that this helps.