Workstation Host shuts down when idle at night

[jsa]

Running Workstation 7.1 build 385536 on Win7-64bit Ultimate.

Often if I leave a virtual machine running over night, the computer will be OFF in the morning, and I get the unexpected shutdown when rebooting.

There may be a memory dump, but its huge, and there is an alert in the system events about the reboot from unexpected shutdown, but there is

no eventlog entry about the shutdown itself.

If I simply suspend all VMs I can leave Workstation running with no host shutdowns for weeks.  Same if I shutdown workstation all togther.

The machine is rediculously stable (a run of the mill HP Core2Quad). Lots of memory. Its on 24/7, and the only time it reboots is if Microsoft Patch Tuedsay desides it needs to, or when this vmware related shutdown happens.

But If I leave a virtual machine running in Vmware over night, it just seems to crash the entire host computer just about every day.

The VMs I run are mostly older versions of windows (win2k), and occasionally a Linux VM.  The shutdowns do not seem related to any specific Virtual Machine.  All the VMs are very generic in nature, no special devices.  All of them use Bridged networking.

Anyone seen this

[continuum]

find hints about the activity of the guests when the host shuts down
you should find something in the vmware.logs of the respective VMs - and maybe also in the UI-log

[jsa]

Not seeing anything in there. 

All indications were that the host just shut down without giving any of the VMs a chance to write anything.

Also it seems like the Log gets restarted each time you fire up the virtual machines.

The log for VMware itself was also un enlightening.

Guess I'll keep shutting down at night for the time being.

[austinman]

FYI - I started a new discussion at: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/332506

I am the same issue with Workstation 7.1 build 385536 on Win7-64bit Pro. and after an upgrad to version 8. As I sit here with the VM installing a Ghost image onto a partition, the PC (Thinkpad T400, 8GB RAM) closed down

This 'feature' becomes rather irratating if it shuts down the PC during a time consuimng operation. I will try, as suggested, to get some logs.

If anyone has any ideas on what may be causing this (hardware, software, etc.) I would love to hear them.

<10/13/2011> After I posted the above I ran diagnostics while the VM re-Ghosted a partition and the PC once again shutdown. Just before the shutdown I noticed a dialogue box was displayed with a stop icon. Unfortunatly I was not able to read the text before the PC powered off.

I am going to run stress tests on the hardware (memory, CPU, etc.) and see if there any issues with the PC hardware. This will be followed by running the same VM image on a number of  PC's and host OSs to see if they shutsdown. This has gone from being annoying to a show stopper for me. An alternative solution will have to be found if I cannot find a fix for this issue.

[austinman]

After a lot of experimenting, I can report that the reason for my Lenovo T400 shutting down while running Workstation was overheating of the GPU (and possible the CPU). What started as an intermittent problem got progressively worse, to the point where I was ready to go and buy a new laptop.

There is some excellent advice on the Lenovo community site, as it appears the Lenovo T400 has a habit of overheating 😞 The best solution appears to be a tube of Artic Silver 5 thermal grease, and doing a better job than Lenovo of thermally bonding the CPU and GPU to the heatsinks.