Today I received the question if vSphere HA respects the startup order which is part of the vApp configuration. I guess I can be short and sweet on it: No it does not. A vApp is basically a resource pool. In order to define HA restart priorities you will need to use the Cluster settings. Yes I realize that this has some limitiations currently, but at the moment it is all you can do. I would definitely recommend in any environment to document the startup sequence of multi-tier apps. I promise that it will come in handy at some point.
If you would like to set your start up priority you can do that as follows:
