HA VM Monitoring for Single VM in vSphere

I have HA VM monitoring turned off on a specific cluster in a vSphere 5.1 environment. However, I wanted to ensure a certain VM was monitored to fit in line with an SLA. The cluster settings were disabled as expected.  To enable VM monitoring please ensure VM tools are installed and up to date.

 

VM-Monitoring1

 

However you can override the cluster setting at a VM level. Go to your desired Cluster -> Manage -> Settings -> VM Overrides -> Then click the + sign.

VM-Monitoring2

Select the VM you want to monitor then choose your VM restart policy. In this case im selecting High

The restart policy is based on checking the VM for regular VM tools heartbeats. If no VM tools heartbeats have been received for x seconds (eg 30 on High the setting) then the the VMs I/O activity will be examined for the previous 120 seconds. If no netowork or disk activity has occurred then the VM will be restarted.


Here is a quick overview of the Monitoring Sensitivity 

Level Failure Interval Min uptime Max per-VM resets Maximum resets time window
High 30 120 3 within 1hr
Medium 60 240  3 within 1 day
Low 120 480 3 within 1 week