insufficient resources to satisfy configured failover level for ha

[dmagnoni]

Hi all,

While powering up a VM the error "insufficient resources to satisfy configured failover level for ha". Which resource is insufficient? How I can find it?

Many thanks for answers.

[MayurPatel]

First check under the VMware HA, what is the Current Failover Capacity[/b] value it should be greater then 0.

[admin]

Unfortunately, there is currently no way to determine whether the resource in question is cpu or memory (or both) based on the fault or VC logs. You can try manually do the calculation to determine the failover level to see where the bottleneck is. So my posting on this thread for some details: http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=483360

[dmagnoni]

There is a formula for memory? The CPU usage is lower than 2% on each host. In cluster there are 3 hosts and the memory usage is about 40% 20% and 40%.

[admin · Accepted solution]

The current failover level is not based on current cpu/memory usage but on the the vm reservations (ie. the minumum resources you specify for the vm). To see reservations of the vms, go to the "Resource Allocation" tab for the cluster- you can click on the cpu and memory views to see the reservation for each. What are you maximum cpu/memory reservations for all vms in the cluster?

[dmagnoni]

In the cluster there are 15 VMs. Only one has a reservation (1431 MHz and 724 MB).

[admin]

Well, that is the problem. As I wrote in the other thread I mentioned above, the "slot size" is defined by the largest cpu and memory reservation across all powered on vms in the cluster. So in your case the "slot size" is (1431 MHz, 724 MB). Determine how many of these slots could fit into each host and how many hosts could fail and still leave you with 15 slots (one for each vm) - that number is the current failover level.

Using the largest cpu/memory reservation to define a slot is a gross simplification but it makes an otherwise NP-complete problem tractable. There are some heuristics that could be used to improve the accuracy of the HA admission control but this is how it is currently implemented.

[dmagnoni]

If I remove all the reservation (one in this case) which is the "slot size"?

[dmagnoni]

-

[dmagnoni]

Great! now the failover capacity is 2!

[admin]

Reservations are 0 by default. However all vms have some memory overhead which is used by the virtualization layer (typically between 50 and 80 MB). So if you don't specify any reservations the slot size will just be based on this memory overhead.

It is not recommended to leave the reservation at 0 though, since that can result in a current failover level that is higher than you probably want it to be since all vms require some amount of cpu and memory (above the overhead) to be usable. You should set the reservation of at least 1 vm to this amount.