Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Insufficient resources to satisfy HA failover level on cluster

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I had this question yesterday where the error “Insufficient resources to satisfy HA failover level on cluster” comes from. And although it is hopefully clear to all of my regular readers this is caused by something that is called vSphere HA Admission Control, I figured I would reemphasize it and make sure people can easily find it when they do a search on my website.

When vSphere HA Admission Control is enabled vCenter Server validates if enough resources are available to guarantee all virtual machines can be restarted. If this is not the case the error around the HA failover level will appear. So what could cause this to happen and how do you solve it?

  • Are all hosts in your cluster still available (any hosts down )?
    • If a host is down  it could be insufficient resource are available to guarantee restarts
  • Check which admission control policy has been selected
    • Depending on which policy has been selected a single large reservation could skew the admission control algorithm (primarily “host failures” policy is impacted by this)
  • Admission Control was recently enabled
    • Could be that the cluster was overcommitted, or various reservations are used,  causing the policy to be violated directly when enabled

In most cases when this error pops up it is caused by a large reservation on memory or CPU and that should always be the first thing to check. There are probably a million scripts out there to check this, but I prefer to use either the CloudPhysics appliance (cloud based flexible solution with new reports weekly), or RVTools which is a nice Windows based utility that produces quick reports. If you are interested in more in-depth info on admission control I suggest reading this section of my vSphere HA deepdive page.

Win A free copy of the ‘VMware ThinApp 4.7 Essentials’, just by leaving a comment!

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*** CONTEST CLOSED, winners will receive an email ***

For the contest we have two copies of VMware ThinApp 4.7 Essentials to be given away to two lucky winners.

How you can win:
To win your copy of this book, all you need to do is leave a comment below which highlights the reason “why you would like to win this book”.

Please note: Winners residing only in the USA and Europe would get a chance to win print copies. Others would be provided with eBook copies.

The contest is valid for 7 days, and is open to everyone. Winners will be selected on the basis of their comment posted and will be notified on Thursday December 6th.

VMware ThinApp 4.7 Essentials is written by Peter Björk.

In this book you will learn about how application virtualization works and how to deploy ThinApp packages. You will learn how to update and tweak ThinApp Projects before distribution. This book will then cover design and implementation considerations for future ThinApp projects.

This book will be useful to developers, System admins and consultants who want to install and manage a virtualized app environment using VMware ThinApp 4.7.

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Changes: I am joining VMware R&D!

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I just wanted to let all of you know that I have decided to take on a new challenge within VMware. Per December 1st I will be joining the R&D organization as part of Integration Engineering. In this team I will be providing operational and architectural feedback on our products to engineering and I will be exploring new possibilities with our products. Needless to say I am very excited about it!

I want to thank my management (Kaushik Banerjee and Bogomil Balkansky) for supporting my move and supporting me the last two years within Technical Marketing. I also want to thank all of my Technical Marketing friends for the fun projects we worked on together.

I am looking forward to getting started within Integration Engineering, and I am thankful for this awesome opportunity. I have been saying this at every single session I presented, but just as a reminder, if you have feedback around products / features / work flows / operational efficiency, don’t hesitate to let me know.

vCenter Extension error when deploying vSphere Replication?

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I’ve seen this popping up fairly often now and was under the impression I wrote about it a while back, but can’t find it. So here you go. If during the deployment of an OVF, in this case vSphere Replication, you hit a vCenter extension error it is probably due to a field missing in the vCenter runtime section of the vCenter settings.

The error which is shown in the log is:

“The virtual machine ‘<vm name>’ has a required vService dependency ‘vCenter Extension Installation’ which is not bound to a provider.”

It will show up in the UI with “No provider available” and “This dependency is required”. You can simply solve this by doing the following:

  • Open the vSphere Client
  • Go to “Administration” and “vCenter Server Settings”
  • Click “Runtime Settings”
  • Ensure both “Managed IP Address” (typically missing) and “vCenter Server Name” are filled out.
    vcenter extension error

Now the OVF should deploy correctly. Note that the “Managed IP Address” field is empty by default, so if you are deploying a new vCenter Server instance make sure to fill it out. This will help preventing from running into the vCenter extension error in the future when adding other services.