I was just testing the new, but still experimental feature, Distributed Power Management. I’ve installed 3 ESX Hosts and added all of them into an HA-DRS Cluster. I enabled DPM and set the mode to manual and pressed “Generate recommendations”. I had one host with an HA failure and DPM recommend me to switch off another host. Which in this case would leave me with no host for redundancy… weird.

I’ve also witnessed that the host with two VM’s running on it was recommended for a power down, instead of the host that did not have any VM’s running.

The VMware website states:

 When resource requirements of workloads increase, DPM brings powered-down hosts back online to ensure service levels are met.

I guess having a full working HA cluster is definitely top priority to meet service level agreements, so be careful with this option and test it really well…