VCAP-DCA Mock Lab Q4
November 03, 2010 
Sean Crookston 
The following is a mock lab question for the VCAP-DCA exam. I’ve pulled some things from the blueprint that I felt were good to study and tried turning them into an individual question that would aid in studying for the exam. Please provide your feedback and answers to the question in the comments section below. I will post my solution and approve comments with the solution within a few days time.
Question
You have deployed a new virtual machine by importing an ovf (Open Virtualization Format). You quickly discover an issue though. The virtual machine is not able to be powered on and you receive the following error:
“insufficient resources to satisfy configured failover level for ha”
You check each of the hosts and see that they are all under 60% utilized for memory and cpu. You also check the Advanced Runtime Info for the cluster and see the slot size is set to 256 mhz, 1 vCPU, 256 mb.
Resolve the issue to allow the virtual machine to power on, but ensure failover capacity for the ha cluster is maintained.
Answer
Please provide your solutions, questions, etc in the comments section below.
Tags: 
Disable Admission Control. Power on the VM. Enable Admission Control. Don’t mess with the failover settings.
In this case I’d check the individual Virtual Machines reservation. Common with Appliances seems to be the use of reservations which will change the slot size. I’ve received this same error message as result and had to adjust the virtual machine’s reservations. Other options would be to manually specify the slot size or use resource pools, which don’t affect the slot size.
If the machine had a reservation the slot size would be changed from the default, witch is 250MHz and highist memory overhead. I suspect the problem here is that there are not enougth slots to provide HA faliure. Would have to check the slot information in the advanced runtime option. As the spec of the hosts is not given they may well have no free slots.
If I saw this question, I’d change the admission control policy from Number of Hosts, to Percentage Based Reserved Resources & set it to something like 30% (leaving 10% cluster headroom to power on that VM).
I’ve still ensured there is failover capacity, but it’s now calculated differently.