Virtually Jason

One of my customers recently had a host throw a PSOD.  It's a large environment with appropriate spare capacity, so that wasn't a major issue.  I mean, we never want a host to go down, but we designed the environment to accommodate that situation and it largely responded well... except for 2 VMs.  They errored out, with a message saying that "vSphere HA unsuccessfully failed over this virtual machine... ...Reason: An error occured during host configuration".  We found a related event that said, "Operation failed, diagnostics report: Failed to open file /vmfs/volumes/<Datastore UUID>/.dvsData/<DVS UUID>/<Port Number> Status (bad0003)= Not found".  True to the error message, that file was not there. VMware has a KB Article about this issue, but it's related to vSphere 5.0, when Storage vMotion fails to move a file that HA requires for tracking the VM on the Distributed vSwitch.  This customer is on vSphere 5.5 (and has been for a signi...

After installing an ESXi cluster, of course you want to validate its functionality.  vMotion/DRS are easy to validate, but how about HA?  Just pull the power cable out of the back of one of your ESXi hosts, right? Well, that will do it... but it's also a bit risky.  I've seen host configurations fail to come back from an unexpected power failure and I've heard stories of hardware damage stemming from such an event.  So, a power failure is probably not the best option... so what else can you try? You could always induce a Host Isolation event .  Simply disconnect all of the network cables from the ESXi host, which will trigger the specified HA response.  That works, but it's a bit of a pain, as you're likely going to need to unplug several cables and keep track of exactly where they belong.  If you're remote, you'll need to involve the network team to get them to shut down specific ports (and you'd better hope that there's no miscommunication rega...