Today I noticed a lot of people end-up on my blog by searching for an error which has got to do with HA heartbeat datastores. Heartbeat datastores were introduced in vSphere 5.0 (vCenter 5.0 actually as that is where the HA agent comes from!!) and I described what it is and where it comes in to play in my HA deepdive section. I just wanted to make the error message that pops up when the minimum amount of heartbeat datastore requirement is not met was easier to google… This is the error that is shown when you only have 1 shared datastore available to your hosts in an HA cluster:
The number of vSphere HA heartbeat datastores for this host is 1 which is less than required 2
Or the other common error, when there are no shared datastores at all:
The number of vSphere HA heartbeat datastores for this host is 0 which is less than required 2
You can either add a datastore or you can simply add an advanced option in your vSphere HA cluster settings. This advanced option is the following:
das.ignoreInsufficientHbDatastore = true
This advanced option will suppress the host config alarm that the number of heartbeat datastores is less than the configured das.heartbeatDsPerHost. By default this is set to “false”, and in this example will be set to true.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)
