If the destination ESXi host for a restore operation is unavailable because the host is in maintenance mode or is disconnected, then the operation automatically selects a different host in the same cluster. You can disable this behavior, or you can extend the behavior to other scenarios.
If the specified destination host is not in a cluster or the host was removed from the inventory, then the restore operation does not select a different host, and the operation fails.
This is the default behavior for SP13 and more recent service packs.
You can extend this behavior to include in-place restore operations where the host or the datastore is not available.
To control this behavior, you can configure the following additional settings:
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RestoreToAlternateHostInClusterAllowed: By default, restore operations can select an alternate host. To disable host substitution when the destination host is not available, configure this additional setting and set the value to false.
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UpdateRestoreLocationAllowed: To enable a restore operation to automatically select a host or a datastore from the same cluster as the source VM if the original host and datastore are not available, configure this additional setting.
The UpdateRestoreLocationAllowed additional setting is supported only for in-place restore operations for VMware. You can use it to substitute a different host when the original host does not exist. Also, if the destination datastore is not available, then the restore operation can select the datastore that has the greatest amount of available space from the set of datastores that are common to all nodes of the cluster.
Procedure
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To the VSA proxy, add the additional settings as shown in the following table.
For instructions about adding an additional setting from the CommCell Console, see Adding or Modifying Additional Settings from the CommCell Console.
Additional Setting
Category
Type
Value
VirtualServer
Boolean
true (the default value)
VirtualServer
Boolean
true