2

Anyone encounter a problem in which the Guest OS in VMware Server randomly shuts down?

This has happened about once a month, where VMware Server just shuts down ALL guests OS. The host machine is fine, and you can log into the web management of VMware Server, it's just all guest OS get shutdown with no apparent reason. Even the logs say vmware guest os so and so was shut down, but no details why.

This is not just one one machine, we have VMware server installed on three different PowerEdge servers and they all have encounter the same problem. We've tripped checked all settings and nothing is out of the ordinary.

1
  • What version is your VMware Server and what is the host OS? It's known that VMware Server 2 (through 2.02) only supports Red Hat 5.3 / CentOS 5.3 reliably. Nov 4, 2010 at 16:54

3 Answers 3

1

Are the VM disks located on the local hard drive, or on some kind of shared storage, like NFS? There is a possibility of VM's shutting down because they lose the connection to the drive share.

Check the vmware.log file and see if you could find anything strange there.

Also, check alerts and triggers. It may be shutting down your VM's during high CPU or Memory load.

0
0

What version of VMware Server? We had this experince with 1.07. If an admin logged on to the VMware Server console on the host machine and then logged off, all VMs would shut down. This is the expected behavior.

1
  • We are using the latest version of VMware Server which is 2.0 and this does not seem to be the issue. The shut downs seem to be truly random, the logs show the guest OSes being shut down at random times, 2AM in once instance, another at 7PM. Nov 19, 2009 at 16:38
0

FWIW VMware Server hit end-of-availability earlier this year: http://www.vmware.com/support/policies/lifecycle/general/index.html#policy_server . I recently ran into this when I thought I'd throw a quick instance on an unused Ubuntu 10.04 LTS workstation, and found that it needs patches to compile the kernel modules. And then that Firefox 3.6+ needs tweaks to access its web UI. This reply isn't an attempt at solving your specific problem, but I thought you might consider the effort you put into this as you may end up arranging deck chairs on the Titanic (just before, say, migrating to a free ESXi server).

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .