Last week I visited Palo Alto. I had a long conversation with my friends from the vSphere HA team. I have done a series of articles in the past asking for feedback/comments on future features/functions of HA that the team is looking to implement. One of the first features I would like to discuss is Orchestrated Restart and Restart Priority. Funny enough, this feature is one I discussed in the previous series as well.
For those who don’t know, today you can specify in the vSphere Client what the dependency is between VMs. If a host fails, or multiple hosts fail, and the VMs in a dependency chain are impacted than HA ensures that these VMs are powered on in a particular order. And actually, vSphere HA also has the ability to specify what the restart priority should be of VMs. I described both of these features here. The difference between the two is fairly straightforward though: restart priority are considered “soft rules” and restart orchestration is considered a hard rule. In other words: if one VM can’t be restarted when restart orchestration is used then the next batch will not start.
The UI, to be honest, is confusing, and having two similar concepts that more or less do the same is also confusing. We have discussed various things we would like to have your opinion on. Please leave your feedback in the comments using a valid email address, this way when needed we can follow up.
- Would you like to have the ability to restart a full chain of VMs, when Orchestration or Priority is enabled and only a few VMs in the chain are impacted by a failure? In other words, would you like to have an option that allows you to restart running VMs that are part of a chain which is impacted by a failure?
- Would you like to have Orchestrated Restarts / Restart Priority for APD impacted VMs and VM & App Monitoring as well?
- Would you like to have Orchestrated Restarts and Restart Priority combined in a single feature?
- Potentially have an option to have multi-level for Orchestration like Restart Priority has
- Define if it is a “hard” or “soft” rule
And of course, if you feel anything else needs to change about this feature, then please also leave that in a comment. The HA team will be reading this, and are happy to take all feedback they can get. Please help shape the future of HA!