Virtual machines hanging at blue screen upon reboot

[ark9898]

We currently have a corporate group policy to reboot machines nightly. Our virtual machines have this policy as well. Lately, I have noticed that users can not connect to their vm's and when I look at the machines in Virtual center, they are hung at a blue screen ( like they are rebooting) If I reset the machine, the user is ok again. Has anyone else experienced this issue? This is becoming an apparent problem and I would like to maintain our group policy with the vm's.

[Troy_Clavell]

one thing to check is to make sure all the power options are disabled.

[ark9898]

Currently my machines look like this: power management : standby I have included a screenshot of my power options. I see vmware tools option is checked for everything. Not sure if that can cause a problem or not.

[Troy_Clavell]

no, disable all the power options in the VM itself. right click on the desktop go to properties, screen saver, power settings. Make sure turn off HDD is disabled, as well as monitor

[ark9898]

I will give that a shot and let you know. Do we know why changing the power options would help? Sorry just looking for clarification and reasoning rather than just doing. If it just works, then hey it just works.

[ark9898]

All settings are already set to NEVER

[oliverJ]

Hi,

I have exactly the same problem, rebooting 100 VMs every night, I have 3 or 4 with blue screen. I ll check power settings.

->update : already set to NEVER

[myxiplx]

Just hit the exact same problem myself. Hasn't ever been a problem before, but then we've not really used RDP much before today. I just rebooted a machine using a "shutdown.exe" shortcut and found the VM had hung on a blue screen (not the BSOD, just a blank desktop).

I've rebooted machines hundreds of times from the VMware Remote Console and never had a problem, but this was one of the first times I've rebooted while connected to the virtual machine over RDP. I'm trying to reproduce the hang now without much joy, which would make sense if this only happens for a few reboots out of every hundred as oliverJ found.

The event log on this machine shows that it received the reboot command from shutdown.exe, and it has the usual event 6006 from EventLog saying the event log service was stopped. Could this be an issue with the virtual machine not responding properly to the ACPI reboot command?

I also wonder if this could be a Windows XP / RDP issue, or a problem introduced in a recent security update. Do you guys run the latest Microsoft updates as standard? I'm suspecting RDP since Microsoft disable the shutdown / reboot menu when you connect via RDP so it may be this is something they don't routinely test, and I'm suspecting security updates since we did authorise quite a few more security updates for deployment on our network recently.

[oliverJ]

hi,

we run all Microsoft updates for all of our computers. I don t have anything new about the blue screen problem, we ll try the vdm 3 soon ..!

[TomHowarth]

The first thing is what has changed? has a update been applied, there appear to be issues with the LSI driver and SP 3 of XP. that could be a starting point

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

[ark9898]

Well I have always had this problem, with most of microsoft updates applied so nothing has really changed for me. It is just a rather annoying issue.

[Huw_Michael]

Is anyone else having this issue? We are running all latest VDI and VI revisions / patches and occasionally still experience this problem, just as we did in VDM 2.1 .

Unfortunately the broker still attempts to direct clients to these "hanging" desktops (the desktops ping but are otherwise unresponsive), which causes problems for our users as they are unable to log on. Not sure what the algorithm is for allocating users to desktops in a non persistent pool but on occasions where a guest (desktop source) is in such a hanging state only some of the users fail to log on, whereas others log on succesfully.

The hanging can easily be attributed to guest OS problems, so getting help from VMWARE might be difficult.

My complaint wrt VMWARE would be the granularity of logging on the VIEW manager product, which in normal circumstances shows a succesful logon to VIEW itself and then a succesful logon to the desktop source (after the fact), but if a user logs on to VIEW succesfully and fails during redirection to the desktop source due to this hanging issue there is no logging of this failure. This makes tracking down the failing / hanging desktop source problematic.

Feedback on this would be appreciated.

[TomHowarth]

if the machine is pinging it sounds as through the machine is still in shut down mode, rather than start mode. are the machine that are hanging been logged off correctly

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Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

Blog: www.planetvm.net