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admin
Immortal
Immortal

VM Problem: The CPU has been disabled by the guest operating system.

I recently upgraded to ESX3.5 and have an issue. I am getting the error message; "The CPU has been disabled by the guest operating system. You will need to power off or reset virtual machine at this point."

Any body know what is causing this and how it can be resolved?? The VM is Win2k3.

Thanks in advance!!

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12 Replies
JoJoGabor
Expert
Expert

Has the number of vCPU's changed?

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

No, the number of vCPUs has not changed. Any other ideas??

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JoJoGabor
Expert
Expert

What version of ESX were you running before?

When does the error occur? Is it when powering up the VM?

How did you upgrade ESX? I assume the VM is exactly the same?

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

I was running 3.01 before I upgraded to 3.5, upgrading using the CD's GUI. Yes the VM is exactly the same, although there may have been the usual automatic updates installed by Microsoft.The issue appears to be occurring at completely random times.

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JoJoGabor
Expert
Expert

Are there other VMs running on this ESX host? Do they have the same problem?

Do you have processor affinity set? If there are other VMs, are there any pCPUs that are only used by the troublesome VM?

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Yes there are other VMs running on this host, no they do not have the same problem. There are no pCPUs that are exclusive to the troublesome VM.

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JoJoGabor
Expert
Expert

Hmmm, so its likely to be something within that VM. Have you checked you power options in Control Panel to make sure the Guest isnt putting itself into power saving mode? This should be set to "Always On"

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Take a look at the following VMware Knowledge Base article, about verifying the integrity of the .vmx configuration file

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003748

Do you have snapshots present for this VM? If not, then the simplest way to getting this VM back up and running may be to create a new VM using the custom wizard, and point it to the .vmdk disk file from the original VM. Be aware that if you have snapshots present, and you point to the original .vmdk when creating the new VM, the snapshots will no longer be properly linked and the information lost.

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Ok, the situation is;

This problem is occurring on several VMs, some Win2k3, others Win2000. All of the machines were P2V'd.

Power saving is set to "Always On" in the Control Panel. Processor affinity has not been set, and the number of CPUs has not changed in the last year.

We now have 4 VMs having this problem.Any ideas what could be the cause? Whatever about a solution. Anyone encounter this problem before?

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Rumple
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

If they were P2V'd did you ensure that if the VM was given 1 CPU that the HAL you are using is also 1 CPU.

Have you gone through this process to ensure all drivers for phyical hardware was removed

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Updating tools seemed to do the trick. Thanks for all your help guys. It seems to be an issue caused by upgrading ESX and not updating tools.

Thanks again.

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jqgoode
Contributor
Contributor

Yes - it is undocumented - but VMware tools needs to be updated as part of the 3.5 upgrade.

Also, if you upgrade, it will force a reboot of your Windows VM without even asking you, so plan an outage window for your upgrades

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