Any practical solutions for autostarting VM's in a HA/DRS cluster after a power failure?

[jmacdaddy]

While I would like to think that our datacenter's backup generator can be relied upon 100%, this has proven not to be the case. That being said, there have to be a number of you out there who have found ways to address the autostart issue in VI3. The Startup/Shutdown configuration at the ESX host level is worthless since this gets reset to manual for any VM's that are vMotion'ed. How are the pro's out there handling this?

[jreininger]

When we had some datacenter power problems, my issues has been the SAN always takes longer to boot than my VM hosts. I set my host bios last power setting to 'last' (Dell 1955 blades) so they come up quickly. But I must alwasy manually rescan the HBAs before the hosts can see the disk files. Is there some way to handle this problem as well?

I was unaware of this VM power setting not being retained problem after a vMotion. Ill have to test this myself.

[Rubeck]

I played around with HA on ESX 3.5 U1 a while ago, using 2 hosts in a HA cluster. VC was running as a VM on this cluster... Killed the network which ofc isolated the hosts and all VMs on both hosts were powered off...including the VC server ofc.

Started the VC VM only and when that came up, other VMs began to start.... so maybe a restart of the VC server / service will do the trick.

Just an idea..

/Rubeck

[Texiwill · Accepted solution]

Hello,

Two things... One, the power on of the SAN before your ESX servers would be controlled by the UPS.

Second, if the power features for the VM are not being saved after a Vmotion then you have a legitimate bug to file with your VMware Support Representative.

One thing I have done for non HA scenarios (which will work for HA as well), is run a script from one of the systems that would boot the VMs in the order you want on the nodes you want. The script could also check to see if things booted in the proper order and shutdown or reboot if necessary.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization