I am attempting to test fault tolerance and ran into a slight problem in disaster test case.
2 ESXi 5.1 servers in a cluster.
VM running under fault tolerance on both and is set to autostart.
Ungracefully (ie: pull the plug) on both boxes. (Pretend someone short circuited a rack and blew a breaker)
(If both are turned back on, there is no problem recovering)
Turn only one box on (doesn't appear to matter if it was running on primary or secondary, definitely doesn't like if only turn on secondary)
Also VC is unreachable (remote), only access is shell on the console.
Any way start the VM back up? I did try to use vim-cmd power.on, but that fails. Even connecting with the vsphere client gives only grey out options on the VM.
I know, the chances of both going down at the same time followed by only one coming back online should be rare and you wouldn't want an autostart in case of split brain (although vmware is pretty good about avoiding that with locks in VMFS). That said, it should be possible to manually start the VM....
If not directly, does anyone know if it can be cloned or FT / HA disabled from the command line, or some other trick? I'm not really familiar with using the cli for vmware (used it a little back on ESX 3).
Haven't tried plain HA. Is it any easier to restart a VM from secondary node (also assume communication to VC is down) after a major cluster failure?