A vSphere administrator sees the alarm: vSphere HA virtual machine failed to failover This occurred for a number of virtual machines on a particular ESXi host in a cluster with vSphere High Availability (HA) enabled.
The virtual machines guest operating systems never reported a power event.
What occurred?
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A. B. C. D.B.
The alarm "vSphere HA virtual machine failed to failover" indicates that vSphere High Availability (HA) was unable to restart virtual machines on another host after a host failure or isolation event. In this case, the alarm has been triggered for multiple virtual machines on a specific ESXi host.
The fact that the virtual machines' guest operating systems never reported a power event suggests that the virtual machines did not experience an unexpected power outage or shutdown. Therefore, options A and B can be ruled out.
Option C, which suggests that previous virtual machine cloning operations failed to complete, is also unlikely to be the cause of the alarm. Cloning operations are unrelated to vSphere HA, which is designed to ensure high availability of virtual machines in the event of host failures.
Option D, which suggests that the ESXi host is still running but has disconnected from the network, is a plausible explanation. If an ESXi host becomes disconnected from the network, vSphere HA may not be able to detect a host failure or isolation event and may not initiate a failover of virtual machines to another host. This can result in the "vSphere HA virtual machine failed to failover" alarm.
In summary, the most likely explanation for the "vSphere HA virtual machine failed to failover" alarm in this scenario is that the affected ESXi host has become disconnected from the network.