> I've seen instances when, during a host crash in a cluster with HA, some or all VMs do not come up on other hosts. In the inventory they just appear as greyed-out until the host is brought back up. This was on a 4.0 host (not sure of patch level).
You would have defined the restart priority of the VM's. All the VM's with high priority will restart first and then medium and low. You also have option to disable HA for few VM's. I am not sure if these settings are there for those VM's who have not moved. Also Vm's residing on local datastore or non shared storage will not move.
>We all know that VM tools are a good idea, but we still have some Linux VMs that do not have them installed for other reasons.
For HA to work you dont need vmware tools. This requires only when your vm gos fails and you want to restart your vm's.
>Any idea why some VMs would not come up on other hosts automatically after the crash?
check the restart priority of the VM's? or whether HA is disabled for thos VM's? and these VM's should reside on shared storage.
>At this point I'm thinking it may have been some sort of bug that is probably corrected in later versions/patches.
4.0 is very old release which is not even supported now. However you are using basic functionality of HA so I dont think you are hitting any bug. I find something wrong with your HA settings. Please check it.
Thanks,
DJ