Windows 2003 Guest Random Reboots every 3 to 4 hours

[RichardWest]

In my ESX 3.5 environment I have around 25 VMs running Windows 2003, Data Center Edition.

These systems were all cloned from a template.

For some reason I have yet to determine two of these systems reboot

every 3 to 4 hours. There is nothing recorded in the Event Viewer other

than the last system restart was unexpected. I do not see anything in

the Virtual Center Events and Tasks log for these two systems.

The systems will restart when a user is logged in, or when no one is logged in. It makes no difference.

Has anyone seen this behavior before, or have any suggestions on where I can start looking for a solution or diagnoses?

Thanks.

[Craig_Baltzer]

Is the ESX enviornment in an HA cluster? Is virtual machine monitoring enabled? VMware tools installed?

If you can it might be worthwhile to disable the automatic restart on system failure in Windows just to see what's causing the restart; if its Windows then you'll be left at a "blue screen" which will help narrow things down if its a Windows crash causing the restart...

[Cameron2007]

If you are using ESX 3.5 U3 there was a problem with this. The following articles concern this

http://blog.scottlowe.org/2008/12/23/random-reboots-with-vmware-esx-35-update-3/

http://vmwaretips.com/wp/2008/12/23/random-reboots-with-vmware-esx-35-u3/

Hope this helps