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HA is able to determine whether the host has failed or is just isolated or split on the network by looking at whether these files have been updated or not. After my lab upgrade I noticed a new folder on some of my datastores and wondered at first what these new files were doing there! If you take a look at the contents of the Datastores seen your Heartbeat Datastores tab, you should see these files that HA keeps a lock on for this functionality to work.įiles created on HA Heartbeat Datastores for the new functionality
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Without going into too much detail, this mechanism works with file locks on the datastores elected for this purpose. Select the “Heartbeat Datastores” tab to see which are being used.Ĭluster Status - viewing the elected HA Heartbeat Datastores You can see which have been selected, by clicking on your cluster in the vSphere client, then choosing “Cluster Status”. VCenter will automatically choose two Datastores to use for the Datastore Heartbeat functionality. This Datastore Heartbeat feature should help significantly in the case of HA initiated restarts, allowing HA to more accurately determine the difference between a failed host and a host that has just been split off from the others for example. (I have actually seen this happen in our ESX 4.0 environment before!) With vSphere 5.0, HA has been overhauled and I believe this new Datastore Heartbeat feature is part of making HA more intelligent and able to make better decisions in the case of the Master HA Host being isolated or split off from other hosts. Pre-vSphere 5.0, if a host failed, or was just isolated on its Management Network, HA would restart the VMs that were running on that host and bring them up elsewhere. The message itself is fairly self-explanatory, but prompted me to find out more about this as I immediately knew it must be related to new functionality. It read: “The number of vSphere HA heartbeat datastores for this host is 1, which is less than required: 2”. I was busy updating my vSphere lab from 4.1 to 5 and ran into a warning on the first ESXi host I updated to ESXi 5.0.