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15. Re: Automatic virtual machine startup and shutdown option is disabled/greyed out
frenchyaz May 21, 2012 1:24 PM (in response to ChristophHerdeg)Good question.... and indeed startup/restart of the VMs with hosts are hosts based policies.
You can still disable HA and DRS in a cluster to manage your VMs. HA is making sure that your VMs will restart on another host if the current host is offline however you can manually restart any VMs from your host down if needed on any other host as they are in cluster and they share storage. DRS allows load balancing but in your case seems like it doesn't matter for what you want to accomplish.
What you could try:
create some anti-affinity rules between VMs or/and hosts and see if it suits you
create a vAPP (or multiple for instance: Critical / low / test VMs) which will allow you to regroup VMs that need to restart all together, following an order, having to click only one start/stop button
The vAPP might do what you're looking for coupled with some other settings (affinity rules for the vAPP if possible, ...).
Just throwing stuff out there, every environment is different.
Good luck!
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16. Re: Automatic virtual machine startup and shutdown option is disabled/greyed out
air-wolf May 22, 2012 7:32 AM (in response to ChristophHerdeg)I opened a case with vmware and below is there responded.
Quote:
"
According to both the 4.1 and 5.0 documentation, virtual machine startup and shutdown is not supported in an HA cluster:
The Virtual Machine Startup and Shutdown (automatic startup) feature is disabled for all virtual machines residing on hosts that are in (or moved into) a vSphere HA cluster. Automatic startup is not supported when used with vSphere HA.
https://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_availability.pdf page 22
NOTE The Virtual Machine Startup and Shutdown (automatic startup) feature is disabled for all virtual machines residing on hosts that are in (or moved into) a VMware HA cluster. Automatic startup is not
This feature has never worked in an HA cluster. The reasoning is that High Availability is a clustered feature. Virtual machine startup/shutdown is a host feature. Since the virtual machines are in a cluster, there is no guarantee they will stay on that host. In the past if you enabled this feature in a HA cluster, then you experienced a product defect. This should not happen.
Currently, VMware does not offer any feature that provides the capabilities you are asking for. I'd suggest that you consider using a scripting method to accomplish what you are looking for. The vSphere PowerCLI is one such tool that you could utilize to create a custom script. It is available here:
https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/PowerCLI/ . Assistance for our SDK tools can be found on our communities here: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/developer .
"
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17. Re: Automatic virtual machine startup and shutdown option is disabled/greyed out
ChristophHerdeg May 22, 2012 8:09 AM (in response to air-wolf)An answer that sounds like coming from Microsoft. Hey VMware: That's really poor.
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18. Re: Automatic virtual machine startup and shutdown option is disabled/greyed out
air-wolf May 22, 2012 8:21 AM (in response to ChristophHerdeg)yup, that is really poor answer. I have asked them to escalte the case and see what the escalate have to say.
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19. Re: Automatic virtual machine startup and shutdown option is disabled/greyed out
ChristophHerdeg May 22, 2012 11:24 AM (in response to air-wolf)Hi air-wolf,
there is another thread about this sorry topic...http://communities.vmware.com/message/2047035#2047035...maybe its contents help illustrating to the escalation team that VMwares denial of VM-Autostart/-stop in HA/DRS-Clusters is a real problem for not to few customers.
Regards,
Chris
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20. Re: Automatic virtual machine startup and shutdown option is disabled/greyed out
MaSh1 Jul 11, 2012 2:43 AM (in response to air-wolf)hi,
i got around this "feature" by directly connecting to my esxi using viclient
there you are able to activate automatic startup 4 the vms actually running on that host
if the vm gets migrated to another host in the same Cluster it will work too - you have not to re-set it
FYI i'm on 5.0.0 U1 623860
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21. Re: Automatic virtual machine startup and shutdown option is disabled/greyed out
gaa Jul 23, 2012 11:24 AM (in response to MaSh1)As to the comment "This feature has never worked in an HA cluster" I would like to say that it works just fine on my 4.1 cluster. Anything I set to start automatically, it starts automatically. If I setup sequenced startups, the guests are started in order. I choose not to start, they do not start.
I am hoping that a direct connect via client to the hosts will work because I setup a 5.0u1 cluster in an office 12 hours out of sync with me. There is no local IT staff to do the manual startup in the event power comes back online after a protracted outage.
This also belies the suggestion (by VMware) that I was given as to the best place to run vCenter: on the cluster. If no VMs start, the vCenter does not start and one can't manage the VMs to start them. The Windows DC does not start so I can't authenticate. It sounds like a real mess without autostart.
Is there any plan for support of this feature or do I need to keep my in-house cluster forever at 4.1? If I need to learn power-shell just to control startup, I might as well fully embrace the dark side of computing. And who is going to startup the VM that runs the power-shell?
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22. Re: Automatic virtual machine startup and shutdown option is disabled/greyed out
johari123 Mar 12, 2013 1:40 AM (in response to air-wolf)Hye all
I have question about virtual machine startup/shutdown.
My user used esx3.5,he as me how to set up automatic VM startup and shutdown,which part we need to configure.
Thank you
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23. Re: Automatic virtual machine startup and shutdown option is disabled/greyed out
gh0d May 7, 2013 7:55 AM (in response to frenchyaz)Hey Frenchyaz,
A little off-topic - but how did that Gigabyte GA-C847N-D Combo with the Celeron work out for you with ESXi?
Hard drive space and memory won't be an issue, but how well does that little celeron handle a couple (2-3) concurrently running virtual machines?
I'd really appreciate your opinion!
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24. Re: Automatic virtual machine startup and shutdown option is disabled/greyed out
coafark Jun 14, 2013 9:59 AM (in response to gaa)Well this is still the case as of these patches. I guess they want to force us into purchasing more software from them to auto start stuff...
vCenter 5.0.0, 755629 Server 5.0.0, 1117897 (grey'd out on multiple versions of host). -
25. Re: Automatic virtual machine startup and shutdown option is disabled/greyed out
Ben_H Aug 27, 2014 5:48 AM (in response to gaa)Hi,
although this post is not that recent, i ran into while assisting in creating a new emergencyplan for shutting down a vmware cluster with only two hosts at a customers site.
Well, we ran into similar scenarios in the past. But i do understand, why this feature is not implemented in a HA Cluster (Clusters without HA do support autostart/stop!).
A HA Cluster is not supposed to power down at all (unless housing-changes).
The HA Cluster should have at least one host online to maintain the availability of vms for production. I can't see why there should be an auto shutdown or start procedure, unless the vcenter server is telling, "guys, we are moving to the other side of the street"... and in this case, the admin should be at the site, right?
please correct me, if i am missing something hard.
(Note: normal clusters du have that feature enabled)
Regards,
Benjamin
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26. Re: Automatic virtual machine startup and shutdown option is disabled/greyed out
Terry@MNP Oct 7, 2014 3:26 PM (in response to Ben_H)The scenario where this is most critical is one where there is an unexpected power outage and the admin has no access to the site. Not all of us live in 99.999% uptime datacenters. Someone would obviously be dispatched for the power on, but wouldn't it be nice if your cluster could off/on without your intervention and all you have to do is verify systems come up cleanly? 100% automation of my datacenter is what I'm gunning for, so I have more time to develop the technology rather than maintain it.
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27. Re: Automatic virtual machine startup and shutdown option is disabled/greyed out
coafark Oct 8, 2014 8:34 AM (in response to Terry@MNP)
Not sure if you guys noticed, but even if you have "HA" turned on, you can use the fat client and connect directly to the host (not thru vCenter) and setup the auto startup/shutdown options. These are however lost when you move the VMs. Atleast a somewhat work around. -
28. Re: Automatic virtual machine startup and shutdown option is disabled/greyed out
Terry@MNP Oct 8, 2014 10:24 AM (in response to coafark)The problem here is that you have to do it every time, for every host. As soon as DRS does anything to your cluster, most of your changes are void. I've always felt that VMware should be at a point by now that DRS works with HA. I don't care which hosts they fire up on, but I do want something that is DRS aware which will take into account the delays I have put in. I want my DCs up first, then my SQL, then application servers. vApps won't work unless you put everything in one big vApp.
Maybe I haven't dug deep enough, and much of this is scriptable, but it seems to me one very large piece of the puzzle is missing here. Possibly SRM would fix some of these woes, I haven't researched that.
