I'm running vSphere 5 in an HA cluster across two hosts (vsphereA and vsphereB). I have the HA cluster configured for host monitoring and datastore heartbeat monitoring with admission control disabled (hopefully I rightfully understand that datastore heartbeat monitoring prevents inadvertent and unwanted HA failovers due to management network isolation). Each host has a single connection to a dedicated iSCSI network and iSCSI target (no MPIO). All vmdk's for all VM's exist on the iSCSI datastore. As a test of HA I disconnected the iSCSI connection on vsphereB and was surprised to see that the running VM's on vsphereB continued to run on vsphereB. The powered off VM's were showing as inaccessible (which I expected due to the fact that they weren't running and the connection from vsphereB to the iSCSI target was severed) but the running VM's continued to run and continued to be "owned" by vsphereB. I expected to see an HA failover occur for those VM's and expected to see them "owned" by vsphereA after the HA failover (which didn't occur). I'm at a loss to understand why an HA failover didn't occur for those VM's. Am I misunderstanding in which cases an HA failover should occur?