2008 R2 VM's taking upto 30 minutes or more to shut down.

[MikeS1983]

Hi All,

I'm having an issue with Windows 2008 R2 VM's taking a long time to shut down. This seems to take longer the more RAM they have allocated.

Can anyone tell me why this is happening and tell me if I can speed this up in any way?

The hosts are on ESX 4.0 U1 and one particular VM I'm having this issue with is on HW v7 and the tools are upto date. It has a 40Gb system disk and an additional 500Gb disk attached which is a vmdk on the same datastore as the system disk which is all on FC san.

Thanks

Mike.

[ChrisDearden]

I've had this happen a while ago. If you shut the VM down rather then reboot it should be a lot quicker. IIRC its related to the purge of the swap file for large volumes of memory ( this was on server 2k3 x64 with 8GB of RAM )

[MikeS1983]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

I have tried both rebooting and restarting and the amount of time taken is about the same.

A collegue has also informed me that this has occured on a 2008 R2 VM with only 4Gb of RAM allocated.

Thanks again,

Mike.

[ChrisDearden]

Just wanting to clarify , you fully shut the VM down ? ( not restart in VI client / reboot within the VM ) I have a 2k8 R2 VM here that I can possibly test and replicate the error on tommorow.

[MikeS1983]

This happens on both a restart and a full shutdown. The issue seems to appear after the VM has been operational for a while as the first few restarts seem go through as you would expect in terms of speed.

I am going to do some more testing myself.

Thanks

Mike.

[Scissor · Accepted solution]

Do you have any Group Policies applied that force your Windows 2008 R2 systems to clear their pagefiles at shutdown?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320423

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc740219(WS.10).aspx

Of course, if you have that set you should be seeing a ton of Disk IO from the vSphere Client Performance Graph during a Guest shutdown.

[MartinAmaro]

I would start with the basics

1.- remove unnecessary virtual hardware (If it was P2Ved) and make sure CD and floppy are not connected

2.- Disable the network card and logon locally (if it continues to take to long then go to step 3)

3.- Remove the 500GB (if it continues to take to long then go to step 4)

4.- Disable all non-Microsoft service from start-up (if it continues to take to long then go to step 5)

5.- Check the eventviewer

also check the Guest properties under resource tab and make sure "Unlimited" is not unchecked

Post your findings

[MikeS1983]

Well done Scissor.

It was a group policy set to clear the pagefile at shutdown. After changing the policy shutdown and restarts now take seconds instead of 30 mins or more.

Thank you to all that offered help with this.

Mike.