ESX 3.5 crash but Virtual Centre did not perform vMotion on the VMs

[cyw77]

Hi

We have 3 ESX Servers clustered together on Virtual Centre 2.5. One of the ESX Server unexpectedly rebooted due to hardware fault. There were 5 VMs on that particular ESX Host.

When we check all the VMs that was residing on the affected ESX host, it was all rebooted and did not vMotion to the rest of the ESX Servers

The question is why didn't the VMs vMotion to the rest of the other servers. The rest of the ESX host have more than enough CPU and RAM to accomodate all the 5VMs

My understand of vMotion would be when a ESX host is down, all the VMs will be migrated to the other ESX hosts on the clustered.

[RvdNieuwendijk · Accepted solution]

When an ESX host is down, migrating all the VMs to other ESX hosts in the cluster is not a feature of vMotion, but it is a feature of VMware HA. From the vSphere Availability Guide:

"VMware HA provides high availability for virtual machines by pooling them and the hosts they reside on into a cluster. Hosts in the cluster are monitored and in the event of a failure, the virtual machines on a failed host are restarted on alternate hosts."

So you have to enable HA in the cluster to get the desired result.

Regards, Robert

Message was edited by: RvdNieuwendijk

[weinstein5]

vMotion requires running esx servers on both sides of the vmotion - As Robert indicated what you will need is VMware HA to restart the VMs when an ESX host crashes -

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[cyw77]

Hi

Thanks for the response. I am currently running ESX 3.5 with VirtualCentre 2.5. I am currently not running vSphere. Is the feature available for my existing version that I am using?

Thanks

[weinstein5]

VMware HA functions the same way in both ESX 3.5 and vSphere - when an ESX host crashes the VMs that are running on the host that crashes will then restart on the remaining host(s) and not vmotion

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[geddam]

Hi cyw77,

Thats true with ESX 3.x as well. Thats how vmotion and HA works. vMotion requires source and destination to be up and running. HA powers off VMs, migrate the VMs to another host and powers on the VMs, thats expected behaviour of HA.

This is not a feature. Thats how they are designed.

Hope this answers your question.

Thanks,,

Ramesh. Geddam,

VCP 3&4, MCTS(Hyper-V), SNIA SCP.

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[nanair01]

Thats right! When ESX host goes down VMOTION doesnt work, but if you have included all the ESX hosts in HA cluster, the VM's residing on the affected host will get cold migrated to powered on ESX hosts and get rebooted there!

Automatic VMOTION works only when both of your ESX hosts are powered on and DRS is configured within the cluster. I hope this helps!

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