HA not working, I think

[lil328i]

Hi everyone,

so we have two HP DL 356 G5 servers with ESXi 4 and Vsphere Essentials Plus running on one of the vm's.

I dont think HA is working. I tested this by hard powering off a VM and it was not restarted.

Also, in the Summary Tab, it shows that "Fault Tolerance Enabled:" is no

I'm not sure what this means, is it referring to HA?

profile compliance is also set to n/a. I tried creating a host profile, but it says were not licensed

Whats the best way to test this, in a production environment. Did we waste our money for ESS Plus?

Thanks!

Peter

[weinstein5]

I dont think HA is working. I tested this by hard powering off a VM and it was not restarted.

Hard powering off (I assume you mean by powering off the VM from the vSphere client) will not initiate an HA event. HA is typically initiated with the loss of an ESX host -

Also, in the Summary Tab, it shows that "Fault Tolerance Enabled:" is no

I'm not sure what this means, is it referring to HA?

Fault Tolerance is a new feature of vSphere - it is basically a mirrored running VM so if you have a host failure the 'ghost' vm will automatically pick up the load with no downtime for users - check out http://www.vmware.com/products/fault-tolerance/ for more information.

The only real way to test HA is to mimic the ESX server crashing by powering it off -

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[Josh26]

As per the last post, Fault Tolerance is a different thing to HA, and it's probably not what you want.

The best way to test HA is to identify all the VMs on a particular host, then reboot them to their virtual BIOS. This way they will have no data in use and be safe to power off. Then press the power button on the host.

You should see those machines come up on the other host, after a minute or so.

[lil328i]

Thank You!

Peter

[lil328i]

We recently had a power failure, and one host was not turned on after the power came back up. All the VM's did more to the other host. So HA does work as advertised on Vmware ESS.

Just incase anyone wanted to know.

[AlexTheBoss]

Will HA not reboot a VM that has locked up, say a Windows server that blue screens? I have been trying to test this scenario with no success.