vSphere HA agent might incorrectly reset a virtual machine if one or more of its datastores are inaccessible

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

vSphere HA issues reset commands when the VM and Application Monitoring feature is enabled on a virtual machine and the guest operating system stops sending heartbeats. If a reset command is issued when a virtual machine's configuration file is not accessible, it powers off and vSphere HA attempts to restart it. If the storage becomes accessible shortly afterwards, vSphere HA restarts the virtual machine if capacity is available on a compatible host. However, if the configuration file is accessible but one of the virtual machine's VMDK files is not, the virtual machine is powered off as a result of the reset operation, and vSphere HA does not attempt to restart it. With ESXi 5.0 and higher, vSphere HA unprotects the virtual machine and reports its protection state as N/A.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Embedded
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Installable

Resolution

To avoid vSphere HA unprotecting a virtual machine that was reset, provision the virtual machine so that its files are on the same datastore.