Anti-affinity rule does not take effect

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

During the redundancy test, after the host was reset, the VMs restarted by HA on the other host. But the anti-affinity rule does not take effect.  VMs are powered on the same host, which does not align with the anti-affinity rule.

Environment

7.x

Cause

There is an outage of the current HA master, which marks vCenter as unavailable, during this period due to the ongoing HA election. Because of this, the SPE Placement Engine is invoked for placement of VMs that do not honor anti-affinity rules. 

1. HA master is lost
   1. /var/log/vmware/vpxd/vpxd.log
      
   2. exception occurred in heartbeat to master
   3. state changes to dead
   4. Lost connection to master
   5. updating host fdm states to unknown
   6. exception occurred in heartbeat to master
      
      
2. New HA master is promoted, vCenter marked as unavailable
   1. /var/run/log/fdm.log
   2. new host is elected as master
   3. am now master
   4. Marking VC as unavailable

•  

Resolution

This is expected design when High Availability Master is lost