How to stop some vm’s from turning on during an HA event in vmware

Okay let’s say you have 2 ESX servers running both at 70% utilization. If one server goes out, and VMware HA turns up the vm’s on the surviving ESX server you’ll get a major performace degradation on your critical servers. However you realize some of those vm’s are test machines or non-critical servers and you don’t care to have VMware HA turn on those machines. How do you do it?

1. Right click on the cluster.

2. Select edit settings.

3. Select VM options. You will see all your VMs in the cluster here.

4. For the machines that you don’t want turned on during an HA event, go to “VM restart priority” and select disabled for those machines.

5. For the “Host isolation response” select “Leave powered on”.

That’s it.