The host isolation response setting is used by the ESXi host, which detects itself as being isolated (management-network-isolated) from the network, to decide whether to change the power state of the virtual machines running on it or to leave it unchanged.
There are three host isolation responses, as follows:
Leave powered on: This setting will not modify the power state of the running virtual machines
Power off then failover: This setting will hard power off the running virtual machines
Shut down then failover: This setting will issue a graceful shutdown of the virtual machines
In this recipe, we learn how to set the host isolation response on the cluster.