AutoProtect Corrupts Virtual Machine?

[westes]

I purchased the VMWare Workstation release 7+ within the last week, and I decided to try the AutoProtect feature on a running Windows 2000 virtual machine.    Apparently the feature just doesn't work well for my VM.    The host computer is a Windows XP host running on 3.4GB of memory and hardware is a Dell Precision 390 workstation.    The AutoProtect is set to go once a day.   

After AutoProtect starts, the *host* computer does a blue screen of death (code x8086 and three subcodes of 0x0).   The worse thing is that when I reboot the VM is corrupted and cannot be started.   The startup message complains about a lock in the virtual machine that has something to do with a snapshot.

I go to the snapshot manager, and it shows NO snapshots for the corrupted Virtual Machine.

My two questions are:

1) Is there any utility for investigating the state of a virtual machine and attempting to "fix" it when errors are found?   This would be analogous to what something like CHKDSK does for the file system.

2) How do I clear this specific error?   For now I went to a backup of the VM and copied that over.   For the future I need to be able to resolve these kinds of problems.

--

Will

[continuum]

"Autoprotect" is evil - do not use it

Meanest feature : the name !

"Autoprotect" makes you feel safe - this "safety" is acchieved by throwing everything elsewhere regarded as best practice for handling snapshots out of the windows.

As every user following best practice would be worried about many automatically created snapshots "Autoprotect" makes you feel safe again by hiding the autoprotect-snapshots in snapshotmanager per default."

Personally I use  "Autoprotect" for benchmarking, stress-testing and sabotage.

Before I continue the usual rant here is first aid : uncheck the box "hide autoprotect" snapshots

For future troubleshooting read my notes
http://sanbarrow.com/vmdk-handbook.html

and for edutainment - play with a real mean example
http://vm-sickbay.com/2010/05/24/autoprotect-in-esx/

Ulli

[westes]

It's not very clear what your point is.    Is your point that AutoProtect works, but simply creates lots of snapshots?   Or is your point that AutoProtect breaks the VM, and *also* creates a lot of Snapshots?

I did unselect the option to hide the snapshots.     The problem is my virtual machine never gets to the point of having even the *first* AutoProtect snapshot.   The host OS goes blue screen of death, and the VM is left in a corrupted state.

Your response doesn't make clear for me whether AutoProtect is defective functionality.     And my immediate questions were how do I manually recover the corrupt VM and is there a program to repair virtual machines?

[a_p_]

I can't tell you much about the Autoprotect feature, however if you give me some information about the current state of the VM, we probably can bring it back to life again.

• please post a complete list of files and sub-folders in the VM's directory (e.g. dir *.*)
  
• attach the vmx, vmsd as well as te latest vmware.log file
  
• what's the exact error message you get, when you try to start the VM?
  

André

[continuum]

can you start any VM with autoprotect disabled ?
does the VM crash the host immediatly after start of the VM or does it crash when autoprotect creates a snapshot ?

autoprotect in itself is not defunct - it is just a snapshot timer that introduces no special new features.
The problem with that is that it is very easy to run out of diskspace when autoprotect is enabled.

First thing to do is check if you are running out of diskspace on the system drive.

There exists no program that can repair VMs corrupted by autoprotect - must be done manually