As I use vCenter 6 more and more, I realize all the amazing new features.
One of the features, I came across was Virtual Machine Responses.
This feature allows you to specify what to do in the event of an APD and PDL. Come on, how cool is this?!?
I bet everyone ran into an APD or PDL situation before and asked him/her-self, why does VMware not offer a feature to restart the VM in such an event?
By default, when vSphere HA enabled, Virtual Machine Monitoring is disabled and so are the responses. However, you do not need to enable Virtual Machine Monitoring for Virtual Machine Responses to work.
The screenshot below show you the available settings for APD vs PDL. As you can see, in the event of an APD, you have 4 options:
- Disabled – do nothing and let the machine die
- Issue events – Issue a custom event
- Power off and restart VMs (conservative), will try to properly shut down the VM and restart it on another host
- Power off and restart VMs (aggressive), will forcefully shut down the VM and restart it on another host.
Similar settings are available in the event of PDL.
Important, this feature will NOT protect your VM from losing a RDM and will also not work with vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT)