I just wanted to verify with others here after speaking with VMware support.
We are in the process of upgrading our ESXi 4.0 and 4.1 hosts to ESXi 5.1. We have one cluster of ESXi hosts (3 hosts) that have been upgraded to ESXi 5.1 running under vCenter 5.1. Ha isolation response was set to the default of Leave Powered On. When testing HA, the VM I left on the host that was powered off, receives and error "vSphere HA virtual machine failover failed" then the VM shows as disconnected along with the host I powered off. After about 4 to 6 minutes, the VM is finally migrated to another host and is powered back on.
I tested HA with another VM and that one failed over immediately with no error. I compared settings for the two VMs, and could not find anything that stood out as being incorrect (they both had the same version of vmware tools, virtual hardware, OS and same settings for the VM settings).
I contacted VMware support. There sugestion was to set the HA isoloation response to Power Off. I did that and testing again with the VM that gave us the error. This time it failed over immediately and powered up on another host wtihout error.
I just want to confirm that Power Off is the recommended host isolation reponse for VMs in version 5.1 and what setting others here are using.