vSphere HA virtual machine failover failed because the maximum VM restart count was reached

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• In a vSphere environment, you may observe a vSphere HA alarm indicating that a virtual machine failover has failed.
• The Alarm is similar to the one below:
  

  vSphere HA virtual machine failover failed
  
  vSphere HA stopped trying to restart <VM Name> on <ESXi Host Name> in cluster <Cluster Name> in <Datacenter Name> because the maximum VM restart count was reached

Environment

VMware vCenter Server

Cause

This is the expected behavior when a protected VM cannot be successfully powered on or registered on any HA enabled host in the cluster. Once the maximum restart attempts are exhausted, HA stops its attempts to prevent an infinite loop of failure.

Resolution

To clear the alarm and restore functionality, follow the workaround below:

1. Locate the affected host in the vSphere Client.
2. Right-click the host and select Reconfigure for vSphere HA.

The workaround above restarts the FDM (Fault Domain Manager) agent on the specific host and clears the stuck alarm state

 

Additional Information

It is important to Identify why the VM failed to restart and ensure the root cause preventing the VM restart is resolved; otherwise, the alarm will recur during the next failover event. More information in

vSphere HA Fails to Restart Some VMs During Host Outages