7 Responses

  1. VMware vSphere Auto Start and HA clusters « Ben's Jibber Jabber

    […] It then prompted me to look for more information and came across a blog post written by Michael Webster: http://longwhiteclouds.com/2012/03/28/auto-start-breaks-in-5-0-update-1-not-just-free-vsphere-hyperv… […]

  2. Ben Loveday
    Ben Loveday at |

    I just stumbled apon this article mate and it raises an interesting point. We are still at ESXi 4 with HA clusters but have auto start configured (although unsupported), purely for the reasons you mentioned. We run a vMA on each cluster to handle UPS shutdown. If the power was lost and the vMA shut the host down, the vMA would not auto start on power being restored. Then if we had a subsequent power failure the host would drop without being shut down safely. Also very true for the VSA, we nearly deployed these to 20+ sites and having to restart them manually after power failure would have been problematic! Will be interesting to see if VMware brings auto start functionality into HA clusters…

    Reply
    1. @vcdxnz001
      @vcdxnz001 at |

      Hi Ben,

      One thing to consider is the new HA/FDM Behavior in vSphere 5 will automatically restart every VM on a host that failed during a power outage. So this does somewhat mitigate the risk of not having auto start. HA now remembers which VM’s were powered off and which ones were powered on and need to be restarted. You can read about what happens in a complete failure scenario in my article vSphere 5 HA Complete Failure Experience – http://longwhiteclouds.com/2012/02/28/vsphere-5-h…. I've updated the article now to include a link through to this one.

      Reply
  3. Problems with ESXi 5.0 Update 1 Auto Start? | Tinkertry

    […] Auto Start Breaks in 5.0 Update 1 – Not Just Free vSphere Hypervisor Versionhttp://longwhiteclouds.com/2012/03/28/auto-start-breaks-in-5-0-update-1-not-just-free-vsphere-hyperv… […]

  4. Stanislas Elie
    Stanislas Elie at |

    One could create a vApp container under the HA cluster and put VMs in it, then, you can set the auto-start order of the VMs within the vApp container. That, combined with the behavior described in the previoous post should be good enough to replace the autostart feature that was lost.

    Reply
  5. VM Auto Start feature fixed in ESXi 5.0 Update1 « Aravind Sivaraman

    […] ESXi 5.0 Update1 we knew that VM Auto start feature  has got disabled which was explained here and here. Now VMware has released a patch “ESXi500-201207001″ on July 12th to fix the […]

  6. Hamish Richmond
    Hamish Richmond at |

    Any movement on this with 5.1u1 Michael?

    Reply

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