ESXi 4.0 - Guests are very slow rebooting

[sdietz]

Hi All,

I have ESXi 4.0 installed on a Dell Poweredge R610 - 2CPU and 12GB RAM. I have four guests running on the host, all are server 2008. Each server has 1vCPU assigned to it and nothing out of the ordinary running on it. I have 2 web servers, 1 mail server and 1 SQL2005 server. Each of the servers also has VMTools installed on it. The servers seem very slow to reboot. Each sever takes about 30 minutes just to reboot. The mail server takes almost 2 hours. I've tried searching for the forums but haven't found anything that seems to help.

Is there any place I check to the cause of the slow reboots or perhaps any advice?

Thanks!

[a_p_]

At which point do you see the delay. Is it during shutdown (that's what I think) or during startup?

I'm not 100% sure about Win 2008, however in the older versions there was a registry setting "ClearPageFileAtShutdown"  at "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manger\Memory Management". If this is set to 1 you will experience long shutdown times, because Windows will clear/overwrite the pagefile before shutting down. If this is set to 1 you may consider setting it to 0 (zero).

André

[sdietz]

The majority of the time is during startup. It will remain a blank (black) screen for a quite some time, then eventually the microsoft logo will pop up and begin to load for a long period of time. I did check and the ClearPageFileAtShutdown is currently set to 0 already.

[DCjay]

Hello,

Are the VMs running on alocal disk of your server or what is the storage for the VMs?

DCJay

[depping]

Can check if there is a difference in start-up time between a reboot and a full power-off power-on operation?

Duncan (VCDX)

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[ThompsG]

Hi there,

Can you confirm what storage these virtual machines are running from? If it is local, do you have write cache on the array controller? This can make a massive difference to the speed of the VMs. Also check the state of the cache battery as most controllers will disable write cache if the battery is dead.

Kind regards.

[sdietz]

I do have local storage for all VM's. I did solve the issue last night and it was not related to the relationship between ESXi 4.0 and the guests OS. It turned out to be a pure Windows issue. Just in case anyone else runs into the issue, here is what resolved our slow reboots. We have 3 NIC's on each server. One of the NIC's had a manual IP address, but we did not manually put in the DNS. For some reason, (probably just a windows flaw), during Boot Up Windows looks for DNS information, it will pretty much just loop for awhile until it finally decides to skip that step of the boot up process. Once we added the DNS address to the NIC it resolved the issue. All servers are booting in about 7 minutes total now and we are much happier. Thanks to all who chipped in and responded to my question!