XP VM Hangs During Unattended Shutdown

[VirtualDabbler]

I have an issue with Windows XP Pro VMs hanging during unattended shutdown. For instance when Windows Update restarts XP after applying patches in the middle of the night, XP will hang during shutdown. When it hangs it is usually unresponsive to network requests, though it will sometimes respond to pings.

If I go into the vShere Client, choose the Console tab of the hung XP virtual machine and then click inside the console tab to "activate" the console, the VM immediately starts working. XP completes the shutdown and restarts with everything working normally. But, this is a problem that comes up every month when Microsoft pushes out updates.

I'm lead to suspect that this is related to some sort of keyboard mouse interaction but, I'm really not sure. The VMs are running fully updated XP Pro and the latest version of VMWare Tools (4.0.0 build-244038). This problem occurs on several different physical hardware platforms, though they are all Dell. Has anyone else experienced this issue and does anyone know of a resolution?

[c0y0te1016]

Having the exact same issue while using command line to automate reboots. The reboot will take place, but it will not complete until I activate the console. When I activate the console I see "Windows is shutting down..." which immediately completes and system reboots in less than 30 seconds. I think this is more of an SP3 issue. This happens for me on ESX 3.5 U2 and ESXi 4.0 244038. I use latest vma and vmcontol.pl to reboot the guest. The same script works fine on XP SP2 but not SP3. I also have a vbscript run from my server to OS directly and the same thing happens on SP3 guest until Console is Activated.

Any assistance greatly appreciated.

[RonTri]

I am having the same problem with 2003. Has anyone found an answer?

[chadwickking]

Hello,

We use scripting and such to update a majority or our server systems. Its more like a tool we developed that essentially calls scripts and reports back. We found that when performing any reboots that we should always use it with the force command. So the shutdown command we use is shutdown -r -l -f -t:30 (NOTE: L cannot be used with -m option). This resolved most of the problems with hung shutdowns. Also when the systems are hung we can sometimes run a shutdown -i and still issue a shutdown command as long as RPC and IPC$ are accessible on the remote systems and that sometimes works. I will ask around on our teams because I know we have very large DDV enviroment that consist of win XP SP3 machines (roughly 4000 I believe) and see how they may go about this.

Shutdown Syntax:

No args	Display this message (same as -?)
-i	Display GUI interface, must be the first option
-l	Log off (cannot be used with -m option)
-s	Shutdown the computer
-r	Shutdown and restart the computer
-a	Abort a system shutdown
-m computername	Remote computer to shutdown/restart/abort
-t xx	Set timeout for shutdown to xx seconds
-c "comment"	Shutdown comment (maximum of 127 characters)
-f	Forces running applications to close without warning
-d :xx:yy	The reason code for the shutdown u is the user code p is a planned shutdown code xx is the major reason code (positive integer less than 256) yy is the minor reason code (positive integer less than 65536)

Cheers,

Chad King

VCP-410 | Server+

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[RonTri]

While this is helpful, I would prefer to have my systems restart in the event of an automated shutdown caused by updates.

Is there anything in Windows configuration / Group Policies / or VM ESXi 4 that could be changed to resolve this problem.

Thank you all in advance...

[chadwickking]

Okay so an automated shutdown -

HA can do this if its unexpected.

You could do this a couple of ways in vsphere -

1. WOL - Wake on LAN

2. POWERCLI to turn on VMs. Start-vm "MyVM"

If you are scripting guy you can easily learn powercli to do these you can also search in out powercli forum for more information as well. I hope this helps.

someone posted something similar here:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1378532#1378532

Cheers,

Chad King

VCP-410 | Server+

Twitter:

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[Green72]

Did any of You find a solution?

I have several esxi with an XP-Pro, sp3, 1Gb as the management tool and many hang after the necesary windows updates.

You connect to the console and they reboot instantly.....

Very frustrating.... 

Anyone?

Richard.

[iw123]

is virtual machine monitoring set up on your cluster. This should take action and restart the VM if the VM stops sending heartbeats.