Windows Server 2008 R2 VM issue on ESXi 6.5u2

[islammanjurul]

I am having one strange issue with a Windows Server 2008 R2 vm installed on top of ESXi 6.5u2. Kindly check the screenshot below.

The VM has network activities, when I send the ALT+CTRL+DEL from the esxi console menu, it works, however, there is no Windows taskbar, no desktop icon, no desktop activities, even when I right-click the desktop, nothing happens, clicking Windows key+R does not bring the run box, Windows+E does not bring the explorer, nothing. VMware tools is installed. I need to reboot the VM to work normally, but few minutes after the VM reboot, the following problem occurs again.

To note also that, this is a fresh new installed VM, the VM did not crashed.

Here is the machine specs, someone might come up with solution that maybe the hardware is not in VMware HCI - I have two other similar machine, on top of them Windows Server 2008 is running smoothly.

[NathanosBlightc]

Hi

It's your AD machine and seems to has many network requests like authentication or name resolution ... So please tell me did you check list of process and also did you inspect network transmission? Maybe high traffic rate is the cause of this unexpected reaction on your Guest OS ... can you capture the network transferred packets in the moment this event?

[islammanjurul]

Hello,

Thanks for the reply. Actually this AD is completely new, I haven't yet implemented on production floor. So no user authentication is happening yet.

Server 2008 R2 running on other hosts are really busy on the network side and also on application side, our HR software is also running on another Windows Server 2008 on top of another HP ESXi 6.5 server, but that one is not experiencing such issue at all.

[NathanosBlightc]

So if you migrate both of these VM to another host (exchange them between their hosts) will you encounter this error again? Did you try to investigate this or it's better to ask, can you do it at all and test their performance again ?The result will show us what is the source of problem ... host or VM (because as you said it's not related to the network)

Also check the disk IOPS for datastore of each host ...

[islammanjurul]

Thanks again for the reply.

I haven't yet installed vCenter, so need to do manual migration or ovf export. I am not comfortable with OVF export due to it fails most of the time while downloading the VMDK from the ESXi on my local machine if the size of VMDK is large enough. But what experiment I did today was, created another VM, from the same ISO file (official Windows Server 2008 R2 image from Microsoft site), and still getting the same problem.

Then I tried Windows Server 2012 R2, same issue which is really strange and panicking me. No idea where the real problem is, with the ESXi, with the physical hardware or what!

[NathanosBlightc]

If your second host is not still operational, can you eject that host's disks (with the same settings, RAID and etc ...) and add them to the first ESXi and then migrate that problematic virtual machines to this newly added datastore and test their performance again?

I think the other possible cause must be related to storage performance ...

islammanjurul ... I hope this can fix your problem at last or show you a reason for what is going on ...

[islammanjurul]

Thanks for this suggestion, I will check this tomorrow and will give you a feedback.

btw can you please let me know one piece of info - what is the minimum acceptable disk I/O performance I need to attain while running a Windows VM on top of ESXi 6.5 installed on a non-RAID HP Gen8 Proliant server?

I could not find any documentation in this regards, so asking you here. If you know such documentations regarding performance best practices for VMware or what to expect from VMware based virtualization regarding disk and network I/O, please share some. I will be grateful.

Regards.

[NathanosBlightc]

Disk IOPS requirement for any VM is highly depend on architecture, structure, network transmit and design of Services that are installed on that virtual machine. So I think you should check doucments related to virtualize each service you need. For example for SQL server on VMware vSphere environment you can use this link.

[NathanosBlightc]

Architecting SQL Server on vSphere

And also for Virtulize Active Directory on VMware vSphere :

https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/techpaper/Virtualizing_Windows_Act...