Slow Windows shutdown / restart

[mclark]

I don't remember seeing this until recently, but all of my Windows guests take a LONG time to shut down or reboot. I am talking on the order of 11 minutes give or take sometimes. This includes both Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 2003, and it is almost every guest. These are all on ESXi 4.1 U1. I looked in the Event Viewer on a few of them but I see nothing out of order and no errors. Has anyone else seen this? Any ideas?

[dtracey]

Hello there,

First few things:

Are VM Tools up to date?

Have these VMs got any uncomitted snapshots?

Do thee VMs have more than one vCPU?

Are you seeing slow performance anywhere else?

Do you run any non-Windows OSes - are these slow to shutdown?

What do these guests have in common?  Same network?  Same user profile?  Same GPOs applied?

What sort of storage are they running from?

Is power on slow too?

Is this on more than one host?

Dan

[mclark]

Thanks for your reply. Here are the answers to your questions:

1) VM Tools are up to date (vSphere 4.1 U1 version)

2) No uncommitted snapshots

3) Some have 2 vCPU, most have 1 vCPU

4) No performance issues any other time while running

5) I have a couple of non-Windows OSes such as vShield Manager and vMA. They are not slow to shut down

6) These all use the same GPO, same network subnet, sometimes different users logged in (but usually the same)

7) Runing from a FC SAN

8) Power on is fine and they come up quickly

9) There are more than one host, same slow shutdown on any of them.

[mclark]

Your question about GPOs got me thinking, and I checked the GPO applied to the servers. I think I found the culprit. Shutting off this setting made the 2 servers I tried to shut down go down much more quickly, like in 2-3 seconds.

Thanks for your help!

Computer Configuration - Policies - Windows Settings - Security Settings - Local Policies- Security Options - Shutdown: Clear virtual memory pagefile