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cypherx
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Hot Shot

Esxi 5.0 2312428 vmtoolsd.exe high cpu and memory after weeks of RDP & Console access 2008R2 Svr

We have a 2008 R2 windows server that has a local admin account and a vendor account.  Our vendor vpn's in and logs in with their vendor account periodically to work on trouble tickets, upgrades and fixes to the application server that they are supporting.  A few times now this application has gone unresponsive in our environment.  Every time this happens the CPU and RAM are maxed out by the vmtoolsd.exe service.  Yestarday for example this service was using over 3 GB of RAM under the vendors account.

We've since scoured the registry for it in HKLM and HKU\(sid)   \Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and deleted the entries for vmtoolsd and the vmtools tray icon.

The vmtoolsd that runs as SYSTEM process never gives an issue.  I believe this may be the one controlled in the services.msc control panel.  However we want to ensure we completely prevent vmtoolsd from running under the user content. 

Have you ever heard of this?  The only way to fix is to hard boot the VM because its unresponsive to taskkill, pskill, task manager, and any kind of /f (force) switches to kill the vmtoolsd PID either on the console or remotely.

Its a critical application and we need to ensure that repeated RDP sessions does not cause any kind of memory bug in vmtools.

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