Alarm: Insufficient resources to fail over was notified at HA failover

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• When an ESXi host is down due to a hardware failure and HA/FDM triggered failover of the host's virtual machines, the following alarm may be notified

Insufficient resources to fail over VM Name in Cluster Name that recides in Datacenter Name. vSphere HA will retry the fail over when enough resources are available. Reason: Unable to find healthy compatible hosts for the VM

• In HA Primary's FDM log file at verbose log level, you will see entries similar to:

<YYYY-MM-DD>T<time></time>.239Z verbose fdm[7081B70] [Originator@6876 sub=Invt opID=SWI-46aa9a6e] [InventoryManagerImpl::ComputeCompatMap] Compat list for /vmfs/volumes/5a6fe459-76c6cb64/VMname/VMname.vmx: .
<YYYY-MM-DD>T<time></time>.241Z verbose fdm[7081B70] [Originator@6876 sub=Placement opID=SWI-46aa9a6e] [DrmPE::ConstructOneDrmVm] drmVm vmId=/vmfs/volumes/5a6fe459-76c6cb64/VMname/VMname.vmx drmId=2000806 numCompatHost=0 onHost=1 vmState=5 type=3 cpuRes=0 memRes=0 overhead=101 vFlashRes=0
<YYYY-MM-DD>T<time></time>.271Z verbose fdm[7081B70] [Originator@6876 sub=Placement opID=SWI-46aa9a6e] [PlacementManagerImpl::HandleNotPlacedVms] Reset Vm /vmfs/volumes/5a6fe459-76c6cb64/VMname/VMname.vmx, vim.fault.InsufficientResourcesFault (vim.fault.NoCompatibleHost)
 

Note: The preceding log excerpts are only examples. Date, time, and environmental variables may vary depending on your environment.

• If we run into this issue for vCenter VM and if the host hosting it dies, FDM may fail to failover vC VM.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 6.5.x

Cause

A race condition could occur where if the cluster membership changes OR when a cluster is reconfigured AND when DRS has not recomputed the compatibility set, FDM primary could potentially receive a null compatibility set for a list of protected VMs.

Resolution

Update vCenter Server to vSphere 6.5 Update 2d (P03) or later.

Workaround:

• If the failover has failed, the workaround is to manually re-register the VM on another healthy compat host and power it on via the ESX level APIs/CLI.

Additional Information

Determining hosts compatible for HA protected virtual machines (2037002)
HA/FDM fails to restart a virtual machine with the error: vim.fault.NoCompatibleHost (2036991)