Yes, in the event of a single host failure, you are correct - HA will bring the machines that were up on the failed host back up on a surviving host. But that's not what I'm asking about. In the event of a total failure of the entire cluster due to a power failure, nothing but the hosts comes back. No VMs power back on automatically. To the best of my knowledge, you can't set the auto start options on the individual host when the host is part of a vCenter HA cluster and have it (reliably) work due to the machine moving around. As far as I know, if set to auto start on a host, that setting doesn't follow the machine if/when it migrates over to another host, and the setting might even be removed from the host when the VM is migrated elsewhere.
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