vsphere high availability and VM restart?

[danswartz]

Did quite a bit of googling and came up empty on this one. So I had a VM I was playing with that was on the host's local datastore. My understanding is that this makes it impossible for HA to restart the VM on another host (makes sense to me). It still shows as "Protected", but I recall posting about that quite some time ago and being told that's just how it is. I had another VM that *was* on shared storage, so when I used IPMI to kill power to the host in question, HA restarted said VM on the other host. So far, as expected. What surprised me was when I restored power to the host, the local datastore VM was restarted on that host. I am fine with that (in fact, that's what I'd like to see, if I was running a virtualized storage appliance or whatever). Just wanted to make sure that's how it is intended to work.

 

[k1pp3r]

If a host loses power, the vm's normally resort to "Last State" when it comes back online, weather that is powered on or powered off.

 

[danswartz]

Okay, thanks. This makes sense, I was just groveling through all kinds of docs online, and was having trouble seeing this explained in 30 words or less.

 

[lopoetve]

Protected in this case means it knows what state it should be in - if it can't restart it, as soon as it CAN, it does

 

[danswartz]

Great, thanks!