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roity57
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

VMware VirtualCenter server 2.5.0 (147633) started all VMs automatically after power outage

Hi there,

The subject might sound wierd... Recently our data centre lost power (yes we have a UPS, but various circuir breakers tripped isolating the UPS from the systems). We gradually brought ESX hosts back up and started powering VMs back up in a controlled manner as per a usual startup procedure against a scheduled shutdown. Our ESX hosts reside in clusters with HA & DRS enabled. At this point Virtual Center was not running as our DCs are VMs and we had to power on those first before powering on our SQL servers where our VC server database resides (a bit of a chicken before the egg issue in that!).

However, as soon as we turned the Virtual Center server on, it immediately powered up ALL VMs. This does not happen when we manually shut down all VMs first as per scheduled shutdowns.

Each and every ESX host has Startup DISABLED under the Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown configuration.

The Default Cluster Settings are VM restart priority "Medium" & Host Isolation response "Leave VM powered on".

Now I expect HA to kick in if a host goes down during normal operations, but we did not expect Virtual Center to immediately kick in HA from a fresh reboot and power up ALL VMs in one go. Is something miss configured? Is this the way it's supposed to run?

I've done a search around for information but I can't find a definite answer to this query existing on the communities and am a little confused now by what to expect and what not to expect from HA.

We do not want HA to power up all VMs if the entire cluster goes down unexpectadly from a power outage... in future we may leave starting up VC until last to avoid this issue to ensure systems are started in the correct order.

Thanks,

Dave

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