insufficient resources to satisfy configured failover level for vsphere ha

[gdesmo]

I get the following error "insufficient resources to satisfy configured level for vsphere ha" when trying to power on a w2k8 32vCpu 130gb virtual machine. vCenter/esx 5.0 u1.

Cluster consists of 16 hosts @ 4 socket 10 cores per socket and 260gb each. Admission control is enabled to tolerate 1 host failure. Average cpu usage for cluster is 11% and average mem usage is 24%.

Why can I not power it on with above settings and usage on the hosts which is low?

When I change admission control policy to "percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity @ 25% cpu & 25% mem. I am then able to power on the virtual machine.

Thanks

[SanjaySP1]

Hi,

When we set 'Admission control to tolerate 1 host failure' it doesn't consider the avg usage of CPU and Memory of hosts but it considers the virtual machine in the cluster with highest CPU and Memory reservation and its ability to power on in a different host in case the host on which it is running fails.

In the above case the virtual machine is configured with 130 GB of memory which is 50% of memory resource of any host in the cluster and 32 CPUs which is 80% of any hosts CPU resource. Due to which the number of slots per host in the cluster is 1 which doesn't make sense because the cluster has to manage other virtual machines too. Because the VM in question would violate the configured failover level of other powered on virtual machines in the cluster HA is reporting the above error.

For a detailed description of HA and FT errors please visit below VMware KB article :

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1033634 - vSphere HA and FT Error Messages

To know more about HA slot calculation please visit below VMware PDF document.

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-51-availab...