CVM Start

  • 5 November 2014
  • 3 replies
  • 2672 views

Badge +7
Hello folks,

Recently I was running some Resilency testing, powering down a node using IPMI (Power off server -= Immediate) to ensure VMware High Availability worked as expected for a simulated power outage. When I finished I powered the node back on via IPMI. I was surprised the CVM did not automatically start. Is it expected that the CVM would not restart when a node was powered back on?

Thank you for your help.

This topic has been closed for comments

3 replies

Userlevel 2
Badge +14
All of my CVM's are configured to power on with host, as the NFS datastore on the node with a powered off CVM will remain inaccessible until the CVM is powered up. It's a vSphere per-VM setting and I believe it is the recommended best practice.Out of curiosity, was the node in maintenance mode when you powered off?
Badge +3
Hi BobJames,

By default VMware does not support Automatic startup when used with VMware HA. This is a quote from VMware KB "Automatic startup is not supported when used with VMware HA". Our CVM can auto-start and this is due to configuration we provide with our CVM. The configuration can be referenced from the following Nutanix documentation.

https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/docs/details?targetId=vSphere_Administration-NOS_v4_0:vsphere_host_upgrade_complete_vsphere_t.html#task_i4p_ygh_mn
With Step 3C
Userlevel 4
Badge +18
Hi

The root cause of this is usually due to VMware's assumption that HA and the auto-start functionality should not be used together. When HA is reconfigured, the VM auto-start setting on the host is disabled (in vCenter, for each host, see Configuration > Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown). However, this is not an issue for VMs which reside on the local datastore, such as Nutanix CVMs, that are not configured to use VMware's HA feature.

So we have manually re-enable the VM auto-start fucntionality if HA is reconfigured.

For more details, you can refer to KB article 1024.

https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/kbs/details?targetId=kA0600000008S32CAE