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CatMucius
Contributor
Contributor

Datacenter's cold boot and "Orchestrated Restart"

Hi,

Does anybody know - should the "Orchestrated Restart" feature work in case when all hosts in an HA cluster were shut down and then part of them start booting?

I've defined VM groups, VM/Host rules and VM Restart Priorities according to this guide - and still, the VMs got launched in random order.

Is cold boot of all hosts considered an "HA event"? Should it trigger the VM/Host rules logic? Does availability of vCenter make a difference? In my case, vCenter was one of the VMs on the powered-off hosts.

If not, what is the standard solution to get VMs powered on in a particular order in case a whole cluster was down? Given that standard "Virtual Machine Startup Settings" feature work for single ESXi, but not for a cluster?

The cluster is of vSphere version 6.7, Update  2.

Thanks!

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T180985
Expert
Expert

If you purposefully shutdown a host then its not considered a HA event, If you were to press and hold the power button for a few seconds that would be treated as a host failure by HA. It sounds like youre planning on shutting everything down gracefully and simply want your VMs to power back up in a certain order?

If that is the case then see the following KB: Edit Virtual Machine Startup and Shutdown Settings

However note that

The Virtual Machine Startup and Shutdown (automatic startup) setting is disabled for all virtual machines residing on hosts that are in a vSphere HA cluster. Automatic startup is not supported with vSphere HA.
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CatMucius
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Hi T180985​,

No, I'm not talking about graceful shutdown. During my test, I physically pulled out power cables from the servers, to simulate total blackout event.

Is that considered an HA event? Should "Orchestrated Restart" logic apply to such case?

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T180985
Expert
Expert

Yes, in that case it's considered a failed host by HA. After a short while it will follow whatever restart rules you have configured for HA protected VMs

Please mark helpful or correct if my answer resolved your issue. How to post effectively on VMTN https://communities.vmware.com/people/daphnissov/blog/2018/12/05/how-to-ask-for-help-on-tech-forums
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CatMucius
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Then what can be the reason that it didn't occur? I've set up the VM/Host Rules as described in the guides, but the order in which VMs were launched still remained random.

Is that a known issue?

Should this functionality work when all hosts are powered on at the same time and there's no vCenter present?

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