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Asked: 2015-03-25 23:09:24 +0800 CST

Restarting failed hosts on VMware vSphere ESXi

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When a cluster is configured for High Availability (HA), VMs can be restarted onto an alternate host when the its host has failed. However, I am wondering: if the host has failed, is there a means within the vSphere HA to restart the failed host to attempt to bring it back up? Does vSphere HA just leave the failed host as is? Or must this be a manual effort for an administrator to restart the host? Thanks for any insight.

vmware-esxi

2 Answers

  1. This depends heavily upon the reason why your host failed... Without knowing that, it doesn't make sense to heal it automatically.

    A VMware PSOD is much different than a physical hardware failure, which is different than a networking or power issue...

    So the answer here is, "it depends..."

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  2. Good point from Deerhunter, I should double check these things.

    As there is a way to change this behaviour, but check the article. You might want to view the errors/diagnostic screen.

    Source: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2042500

    Connect to the host via the command line using Secure Shell (SSH) or the direct console.

Note: For more information see Using Tech Support Mode in ESXi 4.1 and ESXi 5.x (1017910).

Run the command: 

esxcfg-advcfg -s seconds /Misc/BlueScreenTimeout

Where seconds is a numerical value. For example:

esxcfg-advcfg -s 120 /Misc/BlueScreenTimeout

    Manual effort I'm afraid, although (hopefully) often a remote method of cycling the power of esx host is implemented. (Ilo/Drac/PDUs etc)

    Vsphere (HA) won't restart the system.

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