Exchange on a VM

[lucheman]

We recently used Converter 3 to convert our Exchange 2003 server to a virtual machine. Since then, every weekend, the machine locks up and stops responding to anything. The only thing we can do at this point is to power it down and power it back up again. I do not know of anything that happens on the weekend that would cause this happen. I know it is not the backup running, we have ruled that out. Has anybody seen this happen before?

[doubleH]

what about a scheduled anti-virus scan? do the event logs provide any clues to services crashing or being shut down?

[trojanjo]

Uninstall any management agents for the hardware you virtualized from. I had the same problem and removed the old Compaq HW agents (or disabled the services if they would not uninstall) and that seemed to help.

[esiebert7625 · Accepted solution]

Here's some good things to do after a P2V conversion...

What should I do after I successfully convert my virtual machine?

If you change from a multi-processor system to a uni-processor system you need to manually change the HAL on the Windows server after the conversion. To do this go into Device Manager after the machine first boots and discovers it's new hardware and then click on Computer then right-click on the processor and select Update Driver. Then select Install from specific location and then Don't search I will choose the driver to install. Then select show All compatible hardware and select the appropriate processor. For example, if you went from a dual cpu to a single cpu then select ACPI uni-processor PC instead of ACPI multi-processor PC. You will need to reboot once you change this. To verify what HAL you are using you right-click your hal.dll in c:\windows\system32 and select the Version tab and select Internal Name and it should say halmacpi.dll for multi-processor acpi and halacpi.dll for uni-processor acpi.

Next clean up all the non-present hardware after the P2V conversion. To do this go to a CMD prompt and type SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1 and then DEVMGMT.MSC and then select Show Hidden Devices. Delete any old grayed out hardware.

Next remove any vendor specific applications/drivers. For example on a HP server you should go to Add/Remove programs and remove any HP management agents, survey utility, array config utility, version control agent, etc. Also check your NIC and make sure there are no vendor specific drivers there (ie. teaming). Check the Services to see if all there is anything vendor specific related there and disable any services that are.

Fyi…if you find this post helpful, please award points using the Helpful/Correct buttons.

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Thanks, Eric

Visit my website: http://vmware-land.com

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[kghammond]

Another thought, I am sure your Exchange physical machine was probably a dual processor. If you did not do vsmp, then update the HAL to a uniprocessor.

Also check into some of the other best practices:

\- disable the com and lpt ports in the virtual exchange server

\- also disable them in the esx server bios

\- disconnect floppy and cdroms in virtual images if they are not being used

\- on one of our DELL boxes, DELL recommends to disable the USB controller

\- etc

Lots of additional reading can be found here:

http://vmware-land.com/Vmware_Links.html

[lucheman]

This system was a 2 processor box and now shows having 2 virtual cpus and we have SMP licensing. I am assuming this means that I have not switched from a multiprocessor to a uni-processor system so I don't need to change the HAL right?

[kghammond]

That is correct, you do not need to change teh HAL if you are using vSMP.