Finding HA Primary Nodes

A question came up in yesterday's “Chad's Choice” webcast about choosing which hosts in a cluster would be configured as HA primary nodes. I'm not going to go into any great detail here about what HA primary nodes are because there is a more comprehensive article on HA freely available over on the Yellow Bricks blog of Duncan Epping.

The short answer to whether or not you can choose HA primary nodes is a simple “no”. It's not possible.

Things are rarely simple though. Technically it is possible (again see Duncan's HA deepdive page for details) but, and this is important, manually choosing HA primaries is not supported – even experimentally.

The good news though for anyone who wants to know which hosts are their HA primaries is that there is now a dead simple way to find out. As of PowerCLI 4.1.1 there is a nice new cmdlet available. Getting a list of HA primaries is as simple as:

[ps]Get-HAPrimaryVMHost -Cluster <Cluster Name>[/ps]

It's not the speediest of cmdlets but it does work. See below: