Enabling vCenter Server High Availability (VCHA) fails This operation would violate a virtual machine affinity/anti-affinity rule

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Enabling vCenter Server High Availability (VCHA) fails 'This operation would violate a virtual machine affinity/anti-affinity rule'

Environment

vCenter Server 7.X

Cause

During VCHA deployment vpxd automatically creates anti-affinity rule for active, passive and witness nodes that prevents any pair of VCHA VMs residing on the same host. 

Error is caused due to lack of Esxi hosts for deployment, in production deployment a minimum of 3 ESXi hosts are required

Resolution

To avoid DRS anti-affinity rule errors when deploying VCHA nodes on the same host:

Go to vCenter Advanced Settings

Set the following parameter:

config.vpxd.vcha.drsAntiAffinity = False

Note: After the VCHA configuration, nodes can be moved to different ESXI hosts and the Advance settings parameter reverted back to True