Windows 2012 stuck on reboot

[VMMikeC]

We are running vSphere 5.5 U2, and we have some Windows 2012 VMs and some 2012 R2 VMs.

It seems when a restart is initiated from an RDP session on the 2012 (non R2) VMs, they usuallly get stuck on the reboot on the Windows screen with a spinning circle. The only way to resolve it, is to reset the VM.

In my testing, this doesn't happen if you try to restart it from the Console (VM > Power >Restart Guest).

Has anyone ever seen this, or know of a way to resolve?

[a_p_]

I've seen this happen not only with Windows 2012 but also with Windows 2003. The reason - at least how I understand it - is related to the fact that when the RDP session (not a console session) gets closed, the shutdown process might be killed which results in an undefined situation. What I usually do to avoid such an issue is to use shutdown -i which starts a process that's not running in the RDP session, but on the host directly.

André

[VMMikeC]

Hi Andre,

Thanks for the tip. Do you use "shutdown -i" with any other parameters, or is that it?

Also, I see it makes you enter the computer name to restart, so are you running this command in the RDP session for the server that you want to restart, or on your laptop (host)?

Have you ever seen this not work?

[a_p_]

The "-i" option is the "interactive" switch which lets you enter all the relevant information, including the host's own computer name. You can also add all the information in a command line or put it in e.g. a batch file (see shutdown /? for help). The shutdown instruction is sent to the operating system itself, which runs on the console so there's usually no reason why this shouldn't work. In older Windows versions (especially with Terminal Services installed) it sometimes didn't work and psshutdown needed to be used instead.

André

[VMMikeC]

oh okay thanks. I just didn't know if you meant you were running this on the actual server, or running it on your own machine, specifying the server name and doing a remote target restart

[VMMikeC]

This didn't seem to help. When we restart, and it actually reboots, it randomly gets stuck on the starting windows logo screen. Only option is to reset. blah

[a_p_]

If it reboots and gets stuck in the Windows start screen, you may want to check whether there's something in the Windows Event logs which helps finding out what's causing this behavior.

André