vSphere HA uses datastore heartbeating to distinguish between hosts that have failed and hosts that reside on a network partition. With datastore heartbeating, vSphere HA can monitor hosts when a management network partition occurs and continue to respond to failures.

You can specify the datastores that you want to be used for datastore heartbeating.

Procedure

  1. In the vSphere Client, browse to the vSphere HA cluster.
  2. Click the Configure tab.
  3. Select vSphere Availability and click Edit.
  4. Click Heartbeat Datastores to display the configuration options for datastore heartbeating.
  5. To instruct vSphere HA about how to select the datastores and how to treat your preferences, select from the following options.
    Table 1.
    Datastore Heartbeating Options
    Automatically select datastores accessible from the host
    Use datastores only from the specified list
    Use datastores from the specified list and complement automatically if needed
  6. In the Available heartbeat datastores pane, select the datastores that you want to use for heartbeating.
    The listed datastores are shared by more than one host in the vSphere HA cluster. When a datastore is selected, the lower pane displays all the hosts in the vSphere HA cluster that can access it.
  7. Click OK.