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dgingerich
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Contributor

Customer's vCloud VMs aren't rebooting properly after updates, vCloud Director doesn't know what to do with them

I have an issue I'm trying to solve for a customer, (vCloud Director 5.6.5) but haven't been able to figure out what to do with it yet.  It goes like this:

1. Customer's admin runs Windows updates and reboots, as sometimes happens with many Windows Server machines (virtual or physical), the reboot hangs in process and the updates refuse to complete.  This is pretty normal for Windows and is easy enough to fix with a reset or power cycle. 

2. vCloud Director sees the VM is rebooting, but then the hang happens during the boot, and the vCloud Director says the VM is in an unknown state, refusing to allow the customer to either power it off or reset it. 

3. Customer has to call us to have us reboot the VM.  We have to use vCenter to reset the VM and allow it to boot properly again. 

They don't want to have to call us every time they do updates, and I don't blame them for that.  I've tried convincing them that the biggest fault is in the OS, and their best point to attack this is to fix the OS, which is their domain alone, not ours.  However, they want us to fix the reboot hang/ "unknown state" problem on vCloud from our end first and foremost.  I don't know what to do with it.  vCloud just seems too stupid to handle the situation.  Is there anything we can do to stop this behavior?

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bdmpastx
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As far as I know, there isn't anything you can give a customer that would fix that. You obviously don't want to give them vcenter access. It goes into this state when the vmware tools has a reporting conflict about the status of the VM. I also have to get into vcenter from time to time in order to fix things like this. It isn't a huge deal for me because it happens so rarely. Even when it does, I am usually the one doing the updates so I am always aware of it and the way around it. You could write an automated script that would run every 10 minutes or so to look for this state and then issue a restart on the VM in vcenter automatically. I think that is your best option.

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