From the vSphere Documentation Center If a host fails and its virtual machines need to be restarted, you can control the order in which this is done with the VM restart priority setting. You can...
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From the vSphere Documentation Center If a host fails and its virtual machines need to be restarted, you can control the order in which this is done with the VM restart priority setting. You can also configure how vSphere HA responds if hosts and how vSphere HA responds if hosts lose management network connectivity with other hosts by using host isolation response setting. These settings apply to all virtual machines in the cluster in the case of a host failure or isolation. You can also configure exceptions for specific virtual machines. See Customize vSphere HA Behavior for an Individual Virtual Machine. VM Restart Priority VM restart priority determines the relative order in which virtual machines are placed on new hosts after a host failure. Such virtual machines are restarted, with the highest priority virtual machines attempted first and continuing to those with lower priority until all virtual machines are restarted or no more cluster resources are available. Note that if vSphere HA fails to power on a high-priority virtual machine, it does proceed to try any lower-priority virtual machines. Because of this, the VM restart priority cannot be used to enforce a restart priority for a multiple virtual machine application. Also, if the number of hosts failures exceeds what admission control permits, the virtual machines with lower priority might not be restarted until more resources become available. Virtual machines are restarted on the failover hosts, if specified. The values for this setting are: Disabled, Low, Medium (the default), and High. If you select Disabled, vSphere HA is disabled for the virtual machine, which means that it is not restarted on other ESXi hosts if its host fails. The Disabled setting is ignored by the vSphere HA VM/Application monitoring feature since this feature protects virtual machines against operating system-level failures and not virtual machine failures. When an operating system-level failure occurs, the operating system is rebooted by vSphere HA and the virtual machine is left running on the same host. You can change this setting for individual virtual machines. ------ The thing with VM restart priority is that it currently the order that startup of VMs is attempted after an HA event. It isn't a guarantee that VMs will start in a particular order. It may work for your environment though. I'd recommend testing it out if you can. Here is a post from www.yellow-bricks.com talking about Restart Priorities and some of the issues with them in more detail: I set restart priorities but still my VMs seem to be powered on in a different order And here is a rough idea of what we're looking at for futures: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2013/09/13/ha-futures-restart-order/ Hope this helps.