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I've inherited a 2-node vSphere Cluster (vCenter appliance in the cluster). We recently had one host crash during working hours. My understanding with a vSphere HA Cluster (and like any cluster) when a host goes offline the other host should restart the VMs and bring them back online. However, all that happened in this instance was the VMs went offline, and we had to manually bring them online on the surviving host.

Is DRS required for automatic failover? From what I've read vSphere HA (which is enabled in the cluster) is all that's needed to achieve basic failover.

Update:

vSphere HA is ON
DRS is OFF - this is not licensed. 
Enable Host Monitoring is ON
VM Restart Priority is HIGH
VM Monitoring is Disabled
Admission Control is DISABLED.

Builds

VMWare ESXi 5.5.0, 2302651
PnP
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    What is the virtual machine restart priority set to for each VM (under the cluster HA settings)? What is your Admission Control policy set to? Is `Turn On vSphere HA` checked? Is `Enable Host Monitoring` checked? – joeqwerty Mar 26 '15 at 20:27
  • A mixture of High (DCs etc.) and Medium. – PnP Mar 26 '15 at 20:28
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    Please provide the versions and builds of VMware. Also, the cluster HA settings will be very helpful. – ewwhite Mar 26 '15 at 20:36
  • @PnP Can you answer the question about Admission Control? – ewwhite Mar 26 '15 at 21:30
  • Sorry - yes, missed that! Updated. – PnP Mar 26 '15 at 21:31
  • What kind of host failure was it? Was it a complete host failure or is it possible that it was a network failure on the host leading to an isolated host? What is the `Host Isolation Response` set to? – joeqwerty Mar 26 '15 at 22:07
  • It was a complete host failure - the PSU failed. Host Isolation Response is set to Leave Powered On. – PnP Mar 26 '15 at 22:17
  • Was your vCenter on the host that failed or on the other one? – Mario Lenz Mar 27 '15 at 18:59
  • On the live host - although, interesting point. what would happen if the host with the vCenter appliance failed? Surely that's a substantial floor in vSphere. – PnP Mar 27 '15 at 21:24
  • @PnP You don't need vCenter for HA to work, just to configure it. But if vCenter didn't crash you should see somewhere (tasks or events on the VM or cluster level, I'm not sure right now) that HA has been triggered and why it failed. – Mario Lenz Mar 27 '15 at 21:50
  • The other question I haven't seen is that I believe vSphere HA requires two datastores to be shared among the hosts - without that, vSphere HA doesn't work. – Eirik Toft May 15 '15 at 00:56
  • Heartbeat datastores are configured. – PnP May 15 '15 at 10:09

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