I have a lab environment with fourteen servers. I have all the hosts in a single vSphere 4.1 cluster under a virtualized vCenter server. Their is a single dVSwitch for the cluster with each physical server having both of it's ports as external managed adapters in the dVSwitch.
Issue is when we loose power, and the servers power cycle the cluster is not restarting successfully.
Issues
1) VMs all start up as noted in the automatic startup routine, but have the error: "Invalid Backing" -> "This host does not have any virtual machine networks, or you don't have the permission to access them." The console for the VMWare servers is working, so I know the dVSwitch is up and functional as the console IP rides over these links also. But none of the VMs get attachment to the dVswitch for IP communication (including the vCenter server). How do I get the dVswitch to attach the physical nics to the environment when the vCenter server is not up? Is their some kind of dependancy to the vCenter server being available for the "backing device" to work?
2) Automatic startup settings for VMs is set per server. I have a few very important server that I want to startup no matter what physical server it has been moved to. Example: domain controllers, vcenter server, mail server, etc... How do I get a cluster wide setting for boot priority such that no matter the last physical server to which the VM was VMotioned to, will start these servers up?
What is the best way to impliment dVSwitches but avoid this chicken and egg restart issue?