How to configure a vCenter alarm to notify when a virtual machine is restarted by vSphere HA

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Users may observe that the default [vSphere HA virtual machine monitoring action] alarm does not trigger when an ESXi host is rebooted or fails, even though virtual machines are successfully failed over to other hosts in the cluster. This is because that specific alarm is designed for VM Monitoring events (such as I/O timeouts or guest OS unresponsiveness) rather than host-level failovers.

Cause

The [vSphere HA virtual machine monitoring action] alarm is specifically tied to the VM Monitoring feature. To receive notifications when a virtual machine is restarted due to a host failure such as reboot, a custom alarm using a different trigger is required.

Resolution

You can create a custom alarm to notify you when a virtual machine is restarted by vSphere HA by using the "vSphere HA restarted a virtual machine" trigger.

Procedure to create the alarm:

1. Log in to the vSphere Client and select the vCenter Server object in the inventory.
2. Navigate to the Configure tab.
3. Under Alarm Definitions, click ADD.
4. Enter a descriptive name for the alarm (e.g., "Notification for VM HA Restart").
5. For Target type, select Virtual Machines.
6. Under Select a trigger, search for and select "vSphere HA restarted a virtual machine".
7. Configure the remaining settings, such as Trigger the alarm and (Status change) and Notifications (e.g., Send email), according to your requirements.
8. Click CREATE to save the new alarm definition.

Additional Information

"vSphere HA virtual machine monitoring action" alarm is triggered due to Storage I/O Timeouts.