This day seem to start like any other but it seems like as soon as I was logged in to start my day issues arose. It seems like I lost one of my VMware 3.5 ESX servers and all the virtual machines on the host were knocked offline. This should not have been a big deal since HA was enabled but, Murphy has a way of making life really interesting. So as I logged into the vCenter client I noticed that the host in question was in a disconnected state and all the virtual machines showed up as disconnect. In past experiences I have seen HA, during a host failure, recover the virtual machines in under five minutes. So I waited and waited thinking HA should have kicked in by now. Time for a little further investigation!!