After VMware HA the VM comes up on the another host with blinking cursor

[Bkamanboina Balayyakamanboina]

Hello,

I have a cluster with 2 ESX hosts with Percentage of cluster resources reserved 50% CPU and 50% Memory as a Admission Policy configuration.

ESX1 and ESX2 - 2 x 8 cores - 128 GB Memory

ESX1 - has 2 VM's of 8 vcpu each and 32 GB memory

ESX2 - has 1 VM 8 vcpu and 32 GB

Test 1:  ESX2 was rebooted as a part of HA test, it was observed that the VM from ESX2 does come up on ESX1 but it just freezes with cursor blinking on the console. I tried rebooting the VM but there no change in its behavior.

Test 2: I tried one more test by removing one of the VM's from ESX1 assuming that there would be some resource constraint and the VM from ESX2 did come up cleanly after the HA test.

If this was a resource allocation problem as per Test1 then why did the VM came up on ESX1 it should given a error while configuring HA. Looks like after Test1  the VM got corrupted and I had to redploy the VM.

There was no reservation or limit set on the VM or on the resource pool. The environment also has vCloud Director configured.

Thanks,

Balayya

[a_p_]

A blinking cursor in the upper left corner usually indicates issues with the MBR, i.e. a corruption on the virtual disk. In such a case, try to boot the VM from e.g. a gParted Live CD which - in case it's an issue with the MBR - should be able to fix the issue. For older Windows versions, it's also possible to create a boot floppy disk/image which can be used to boot the OS.

André

[Bkamanboina Balayyakamanboina]

Thanks for your reply Andre, BTW i am not worried about the disk getting corrupted, I would like to know as to why did the VM come up on ESX2 if there was a resource issue as per Test1.

~Balayya

[Cato Grace]

Keep in mind that HA admission control only ensures that remaining host(s) have sufficient resources for the VMs to start (if they don't have reservations defined - if they do have reservations defined it will ensure that after a host failure those are available). HA doesn't guarantee performance.

In your example, if you created reservations for the VMs on host 1 that consume all CPU resources on that host. Admission control would not allow you to start any VMs on Host 2.

Does that make sense?

[Bkamanboina Balayyakamanboina]

Thanks for your reply, I tried this on a non vcd setup and the HA failover was clean without any issues. This means something from the VCD side is creating the problem. I checked the VCD config details and the

resources assigned are unlimited with 20% reservation. Not sure what's from the VCD is creating the problem. Attached is the vcd screen shot