Whilst preparing my ApplicationHA lab for the SE interlock and Symantec Vision in the next couple of weeks, I was busily just making sure that no errors or alarms were triggered and everything looked clean, one thing I did notice and has been there from the start of building the lab, was a message “The number of vSphere HA heartbeat datastores for this host is 1 which is less than required 2”.
The heart beating over a datastore is something that was added with vSphere 5.0, the new FDM HA agent utilizes the storage subsystem as an alternate communication path and typically needs 2 paths to communicate, it’s actually similar to Veritas Cluster Server heart beating which uses 2 extra NICs for heart beating as well as using disk type heartbeats via Coordination Point Server (CPS).
Ok so how to remove or suppressing of the alarm.
There are a couple of ways to remove the message from appearing, the recommended way is to add redundancy via adding another shared datastore to the vSphere cluster or alternatively you can use the “das.ignoreInsufficientHbDatastore = true” attribute in the advanced vSphere HA settings.
1. From within the vSphere Client right-click on the cluster and edit settings.
2. Select the vSphere HA feature and click “Advanced Options”
3. In the options column enter the tag “das.ignoreInsufficientHbDatastore”
4. In the value column enter “true” for the value.
5. Click on “OK” and then “OK” again to make the changes in the advanced options
6. right-click on the ESX server which is displaying the warning symbol and select “Reconfigure for vSphere HA”
That’s it, once the reconfigure task completes the warning should disappear and you are left with a warning icon clean ESX server.
VirtuallyLG 