meddle2010 wrote:
I am unclear as to why if they are in a cluster and on shared storage they show "disconnected". If I manually tell it to start, it will "register" (with the available host(s) I suspect) and successfully start. But it looks messy and like there is something wrong with half of them showing "disconnected" like that. (not to mention the added time to do this)
Because they are registered on a specific host, only that host "owns" this VM. This is to prevent any data corrupt that might appear if your second host just thought on a wimp that writing something to the disks of that VM would be a great idea. This host also provides the VM with CPU, memory and networking resources, this will not be combined throughout all hosts in a cluster, that is the reason why you cannot allocate more vCPUs to a VM than the host it is running on does have logical cores.
A cluster is just a logical construct offering some advanced features like HA, vMotion etc. which means in case of failure VMs can be started on a different host or moved to a different host without failure at will. This host will then become the "owner" of the VM.
If you shutdown the host now, these VMs will show as disconnected if you do not move them to the other host prior to shutting it down. This is by design and cannot be changed. Either you move the VMs or you will have them showing as disconnected.
As you seem to have DRS you could set this to Automatic but keep the aggressiveness to the lowest level possible, so it will not move around VMs in your day to day work. But if you put a host into maintenance mode prior to rebooting it or shutting it down automatic DRS will move those VMs to the other host for you with the choice to also register powered off VMs and templates which would avoid the disconnected VMs issue as well.