Windows 2003 Services Fail to Start on VM powerup

[infuseweb]

I've had this issue for a while and I'm not completely sure why it's happening. On a number of my Windows 2003 virtual web server machines, when I start the VM some services fail to start. In particular, ColdFusion and a stats helper app I'm running, and sometimes the FTP server fail to start. I have to manually start the service after logging in. In many cases I have to try to start ColdFusion several times because it will fail to start even manually.

I've read on other threads that "this is a Microsoft problem" but I don't believe it is. I think it's a VM performance issue. Most of these are pretty heavily loaded VMs, but not all of them. Some of the more lightly loaded ones also have issues. Does anyone have any ideas on things I can check that could be causing this? If you need more information, please feel free to ask.

FYI, my VM's are balanced across 3 PowerEdge 2950's running iSCSI to a Storevault SAN.

[bradley4681]

I have 2 physical cold fusion servers that do the same thing. Usually the service will just stop in the middle of the day and we have to reboot it and then restart the service several times. I think it's more of a cold fusion problem then anything. As far as the FTP service not starting, is it the native windows ftp server? what do the event logs says when the services fail to start?

Cheers,

Bradley Sessions

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[infuseweb]

I've had many physical CF servers that don't have issues starting the CF services. But for some reason some virtual machines have problems. Not all, though. Some start fine. Can't figure out why the difference.

The FTP service is a third party service that is pretty lightweight and I've never had problems with.

I think the services are just timing out trying to start. But the real question is why and the event logs don't say.

[bradley4681]

Does the event log record anything? They shuld log something when the service fails to strt.

Cheers,

Bradley Sessions

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