vSphere HA Isolation response when using IP Storage

I had a question from one of my colleagues last week about the vSphere HA Isolation Response and IP Storage. His customer had an ISCSI storage infrastructure (applies to NFS also) and recently implemented a new vSphere environment. When one of the hosts was isolated virtual machines were restarted and users started reporting strange problems.

What happened was that the vSphere HA Isolation Response was configured to “Leave Powered On” and as both the Management Network and the iSCSI Network were isolated there was no “datastore heartbeating” and no “network heartbeating”. Because the datastores were unavailable the lock on the VMDKs expired (virtual disk files) and HA would be able to restart the VMs.

Now please note that HA/ESXi will power-off (or kill actually) the “ghosted VM” (the host which runs the VMs that has lost network connection) when it detects the locks cannot be re-acquired. It still means that the time between when the restart happens and the time  when the isolation event is resolved potentially the IP Address and the Mac Address of the VM will pop up on the network. Of course this will only happen when your virtual machine network isn’t isolated, and as you can imagine this is not desired.

When you are running IP based storage, it is highly (!!) recommend to configure the isolation response to: power-off! For more details on configuring the isolation response please read this article which lists the best practices / recommendations.