I had a question about HA Admission Control today and as this is something that has come up multiple times I figured I would dedicate an article to it. This customer had enabled HA Admission Control and artificially wanted to control the amount of virtual machines a single host could run by manually specifying the slot size. (For more details on Admission Control slot sizes and how to configure these read the Deepdive page.) When they simulated a failure they were surprised that some host had more virtual machines running than should be allowed according to the configured slot size… This is however, contrary to their beliefs, by design. Let me copy/paste a paragraph from our book which talks about admission control.
What is HA Admission Control about? Why does HA contain this concept called Admission Control? The “Availability Guide” a.k.a HA bible states the following:
“vCenter Server uses admission control to ensure that sufficient resources are available in a cluster to provide failover protection and to ensure that virtual machine resource reservations are respected.”
Please read that quote again and especially the first two words. Indeed it is vCenter Server that is responsible for Admission Control. Although this might seem like a trivial fact it is important to understand that this means that Admission Control will not disallow HA initiated restarts. HA initiated restarts are done on a host level and not through vCenter. It is Admission Control’s task to ensure sufficient resources are available for HA to restart virtual machines, hence the reason HA does not take Admission Control in to account.
I hope this clears things up. I was pretty sure I have discussed this in multiple articles but as it comes up fairly often I figured dedicating and article to it would make it easier to find. I know it is not really clear in our documentation and I’ve requested this to be changed to reflect the actual behavior and avoid misunderstandings like these.
