vmware guest operating system goes wild and uses 100% of cpu load without any reason

[sasar]

Recently, i had two similar cases with my virtual machines. Both of them were Windows 2003 SP1 ,but different purposes. One of them is SQL 2000 server, and the other one is Pharos Print Server.

Both machine were on same Vmware HA DRS Cluster. And problem started first on my print server which constantly had 100 of processor time occupied, i couldnt find any logical reason for this. I tried with restarts of virtual machine but that didnt help.

Also killing of processes didnt help , because this processes must be running . After long time of investigation , i have tried to shutdown virtual machine leave it for few minutes , and then start it again. And there was a miracle machine started to work normally without high cpu usage.

Similar case was also with this SQL server, restarts didn't help , After shuttig down and waiting to cool of machine started to work.

Is all this somehow connected to some cashing and swaping of my virtual machines or this is related to something else?

I have ESX 3.5 servers with latest patches 77234 release .

Please help

[TomHowarth · Accepted solution]

Recently, i had two similar cases with my virtual machines. Both of them were Windows 2003 SP1 ,but different purposes. One of them is SQL 2000 server, and the other one is Pharos Print Server.

Both machine were on same Vmware HA DRS Cluster. And problem started first on my print server which constantly had 100 of processor time occupied, i couldnt find any logical reason for this. I tried with restarts of virtual machine but that didnt help.

Also killing of processes didnt help , because this processes must be running . After long time of investigation , i have tried to shutdown virtual machine leave it for few minutes , and then start it again. And there was a miracle machine started to work normally without high cpu usage.

Similar case was also with this SQL server, restarts didn't help , After shuttig down and waiting to cool of machine started to work.

Is all this somehow connected to some cashing and swaping of my virtual machines or this is related to something else?

I have ESX 3.5 servers with latest patches 77234 release .

Please help

firstly were these machines converted from physical machine, how many vCPU are they running, if single vCPU is the guest still running a SMP HAL. i

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

[admin]

check out the following KB

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1003638&sl...

[sasar]

Thanks for your reply.

I've spoke with guy from tehnical support, he also suggested this KB article. And this was the reason of my problems. They said that this bug is going to be solved in some new update o patch.

Thanks again

Regards

Sasha