Hello community members.
I'm new to VMWare, and evaluate the free ESXi to proof my concept of moving to VMWare Essentials.
My server has eight SATA disks, each configured as a singular datastore. I create a guest OS (in my case, Solaris) and assign two virtual disks, each on a different datastore, thus, different physical disk.
Next, I mirror the disks using Solaris Volume Manager. Now I run disk I/O and can clearly see both disks are busy.
Now I'd simulate a fatal disk error by removing a disk, assuming the volume manager will take care of it. To my surprise, VMWare halts the VM. For further surprise, ESXi restarted the VM after exactly four minutes, which is great for me.
In the VM log, I see the following lines:
2018-02-07T16:33:29.439Z| vmx| I125: Msg_Question:
2018-02-07T16:33:29.439Z| vmx| I125: [msg.hbacommon.askonpermanentdeviceloss] The storage backing for virtual disk '/vmfs/volumes/5638ff99-591db485-df48-00259032e410/s10/s10_1.vmdk' has been permanently lost. You may be able to hot remove this virtual device from the virtual machine and continue after clicking _Retry. Click Cancel to terminate this session.
2018-02-07T16:33:29.439Z| vmx| I125: ----------------------------------------
2018-02-07T16:37:29.705Z| vmx| I125: Timing out dialog 25919
2018-02-07T16:37:29.705Z| vmx| I125: MsgQuestion: msg.hbacommon.askonpermanentdeviceloss reply=0
Question 1: How can I influence the time the VM becomes suspended, or, to be more preceise, the timeout of this dialog?
I also prepare on read/write errors without having a completely failed disk. For that reason,
Question 2: can I assume a read/write error on a datastore is forwarded to the VM?
Thank you very much.