VMware Cloud Community
Tuteks
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

VM are turning off themselves

Hi,

I have a problem, I have configured two esxi hosts and vcenter version 7 and some of my VM are powering off themselves even on separate esxi hosts.

I see only in log something like:

"Virtual machine on ....... is powered off Information10/26/2020, 6:19:19 PM............     vim.event.VmPoweredOffEvent

There are no related events"

Why is this happening, I configured Vcenter or Hosts in wrong way? Please help me with that.

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scott28tt
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Could be something in the guest OS causing a shutdown, such as power management - you don't say what guest OSes you are running though.


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Lalegre
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Hey,

If you have Windows and it is not licensed and it is over the grace period you could expect a reboot for sure. Could you please give us more insight about the Guest OS?

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Tuteks
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

the problem concern linux based VM, one of them have installed:

VMware Tools Running, version:2147483647 (Guest Managed)

and second one is ubuntu 18.0.4 LTS:

-Running, version:11269 (Guest Managed)

As I see only these two up for now are turning off.

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sjesse
Leadership
Leadership

I'd guess its a kernel panic thats shutting the vms down, you'll want to look into that more especially, and make sure core dumps are enabled. I'd check with the ubuntu forums to for help on that, or if you have support from cannoical or someone similar they might be able to look.

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Tuteks
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I have on my network two older Esxi hosts 6.5 version and on it I have two Ubuntu 16 LTS servers, they have newer turned off in last three years - so this is very strange situation.

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sjesse
Leadership
Leadership

Its not ubuntu in general, I would focus on those specific vms. I have 6.5 and 6.7 environments with 100s of Linux machines which some are ubuntu and I've see similar in specific machines. This generally turns out to always be a guest os issue. Times it wouldn't be your would get an error not a powered-off event.

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Tuteks
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

and yesterday again virtual machine goes off:

" Virtual machine on ...... is powered off Information11/01/2020, 6:46:27 PM .....................       vim.event.VmPoweredOffEvent"

this is not accepted for us because this is production server. Where could I create a ticket for any remote support from Vmware ?

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

Please attach a VM's vmware*.log file (one that was active, when the VM shut down) to your next reply, to find out whether it contains helpful information regarding this issue.


André

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scott28tt
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

If you have a support entitlement, this is a good starting place: Support Contact Options - VMware


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Although I am a VMware employee I contribute to VMware Communities voluntarily (ie. not in any official capacity)
VMware Training & Certification blog
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Tuteks
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Unfortunately I cannot create "technical" ticket because my product are not visible during ticket creation, I don't know why because I just bought Vsphere 7 Essentials with 3 year support.

About logs, this "turn off" incident occurred at 01/11/2020 6:46 PM and my logs from this Virtual machine are:

vmware-5.log     with last modified date 10/27/2020 4:40 PM

vmware-log      with last modified date 02/11/2020 9:39 AM

so my current log and previous one do not store any information about all yesterday incidents.

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

The "last modified" date doesn't necessarily mean that the file doesn't contain data from yesterday. Please check the entries in the file itself.

André

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IRIX201110141
Champion
Champion

A "vSphere Essentials" only contains a Subscription and not Subscription and Support (SnS). Both are right.  There is a log file rotation which kicks in with every VM (re-)start. So investigate the last lines of every of your logs.

IMHO the event/task entries for the VM are different when shutsdown a VM from inside or from the outside through vCenter or one of the API. If you have 3rd. Party stuff like Backup, Automation it always helps creating different vCenter Accounts and not use the administrator@vpshere.local for everything.

Regards,
Joerg

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