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FrequentFlyer
Contributor
Contributor

VM suddenly only boots to black screen

Hello,. Yesterday morning I ran into this issue which I have been searching for clues and answers to for hours to no avail. 

We have a dell server running 6.7 U2 with 2 windows server 2008 r2 VMs.  It's been running without issue since July of last year.

This morning, something happened- not sure what- to cause the server to reboot. When it came back up, 1 of the vms booted just fine.  But the 2nd VM would only boot to a black screen.  After some troubleshooting I found that when on this black screen you could ping the server by it's IP address, but not hostname. I also figured out that you could boot it up normally in safe mode and all was well. I tried all sorts of things to get normal boot to work properly with no luck at all.

What ended up working is why I am posting because I don't understand why it worked-. We had 4 CPUs assigned to the VM originally, I changed it to 2 on a whim and low and behold it booted normally!  What?!   This is a production server for a legacy software.. is why it's still running 08 r2.. so I didn't have the luxury of changing it back to 4 to see if it still works since the server had been down for 5 hours as it was.    But either way... Why would changing this have a effect like that at all?  I'm not even sure why I tried it.. I was grasping for straws.

Thoughts?

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2 Replies
nachogonzalez
Commander
Commander

Hey, hope you are doing fine:

Most likely this is related to a connectivity issue:

Are both VMs on the same host?
Do you have port 903 open on the host where the black screen VM resides? (you can telnet from where you are connecting)
Do you have IP and DNS (forward and reverse) connectivity to the host?

Do you have vCenter?

Can you please post vm logs? you can find them on the VM folder on the datastore.

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Lalegre
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Hey,

Well if you used to ping using the FQDN and now it is not replying then that issue has to be related with the DNS Server as it is nothing related with the VM. You should check your records there.

Can you see the VMware Tools up and running?

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