Interesting Quirks I have found when setting up High Availability (HA) in VMware

While HA is a wonderful tool for giving servers in your virtual enterprise a “close to clustered” environment, the initial setup has proven to be a bit flaky. I have had to scratch my head in wonder at times when attempting to setup HA. Everything is done correctly, everything has been checked and rechecked, and when I finally begin the setup I get an error message telling me the setup has failed. At times like this I want to pull my hair out. However, since I really can't afford to do that (I sit in the express chair at the barber shop... the 12 hairs or less chair) I have been forced to rethink my strategies. Should you run into issues with HA not setting up on your servers correctly even though you know that you have done everything correctly, follow the below instructions.

1. Remove HA from the enterprise and then set it up again. Yes, this sounds hokey and silly, but it has worked for me in the past. Sometimes I think HA thinks of the first attempt as a trial run.
2. Should this not work, in Virtual Center right click on each Host server in your environment you wish to add to HA and select “Reconfigure for HA”. I have found in the past that this will resolve the issues after the initial setup of HA.
3. Should this not work, perform a reboot of the servers and attempt the two steps above again.

The last step is one I HATE to do in a production environment. Often, if you are running a large scale environment this means playing Vmotion leapfrog with all of the servers in your environment to accomplish the reboot.