In a vSphere High Availability (HA) cluster, virtual machines automatically restart on another host if a hardware failure occurs.

However, there are cases where you may want to prevent a powered-off VM from starting automatically, for example, when managing test environments, preventing unnecessary resource usage, or ensuring specific VMs remain off until manually started.

In this post, we will see how to disable automatic VM restarts in vSphere HA.


In the vSphere client navigate to Hosts and Clusters, select the cluster where the virtual machines resides and click within the Configure tab on Configuration -> VM Overrides.

Click on ADD …


Select the virtual machines which we want to prevent from auto-starting.


In the VM Restart Priority dropdown, set it to Disabled and click on Finish.

By default the VM Restart Priority is set to Medium.

In a vSphere High Availability (HA) cluster, VM Restart Priority determines the order in which virtual machines (VMs) restart after a host failure. This setting helps prioritize critical workloads over less important ones when resources are limited.



Now, if the host fails, HA will not restart this VM.

Links

vSphere High Availability
https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vsphere/high-availability

vSphere Availability
https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vsphere/vsphere/7-0/vsphere-availability.html