Windows 2008 R2 Hangs

[SethEfrat]

Hi all,

We are running vsphere 5.5 and our hosts are running 5.5.0.1881737. One of our VM's (has the latest VMware tools installed) went down. When I opened the console, the ctrlaltdel screen was displayed, but, mouse and keyboard were completely unresponsive. The VM was not pingable either.  I forced reset the VM and all is OK now, but, I'm at a loss as to what actually caused the error. There were no alerts in vsphere and other VM's that have the same VMware tools level seem to be OK. Windows event viewer is not helpful as the events just stopped at 12am and resumed again after I reset the box. No errors in event viewer.   What are some things that I could be looking for the determine why this happened? This VM is an SAP / Oracle box and the application logs leave no clues as to what exactly happened.

Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks everyone!

[admin]

What hardware are you running on (CPU, specifically)?

[SethEfrat]

IBM x3650 M2

2 x Xeon 5570 - 2.9GHz.

[admin]

I don't know of any issues affecting that processor.

Are there any hints in the vmware.log file of the VM?  (It may have been rotated to vmware-0.log, vmware-1.log, etc.)

[SethEfrat]

Looking through the vmware-? logs doesn't show much, but the vmware.log file is quite large and is flooded with these errors:

Guest: toolbox-dnd: Version: build-1770165 2014-07-22T15:45:18.399Z| vcpu-0| I120: GuestRpc: Channel 5, conflict: guest application toolbox-dnd tried to register, but it is still registered on channel.

These errors began after I updated vmware tools which was done on July 19th. I'm not sure if the error is what caused the guest to Freeze however. A google search led me here:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=203635...

I'll investigate further to see if this in fact is what is causing my issues.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

One thing I would do if you believe this is a VMware Tools issue is to remove the tools and use the e1000 or appropriate network driver for your OS. In general, I have never had a problem with VMware Tools causing a hang, it was always something else. Removing VMware Tools is the first step to ruling it out of the equation. There could also be a driver stuck in the kernel from a previous version of the tools. So removal may be a good place to start. Then reinstall with the latest version after some testing. Granted this will require a reboot but may be one way to proceed. VMs do not need VMware Tools to run, they do need VMware Tools to add more performance in some cases.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky
VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009, 2010, 2011,2012,2013,2014

Author of the books 'VMWare ESX and ESXi in the Enterprise: Planning Deployment Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2011 Pearson Education. 'VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing the Virtual Environment', Copyright 2009 Pearson Education.

Virtualization and Cloud Security Analyst: The Virtualization Practice, LLC -- vSphere Upgrade Saga -- Virtualization Security Round Table Podcast