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I have a Windows 2008 R2 server that is a Hyper-V host (Dell PowerEdge T300). Today for the first time I encountered an odd situation; i lost connection with one of the guest machines but logging on physically it seems the guest OS is still running but no longer contactable via the network.

I tried to shut down the guest machine (Windows XP) but it would not shut down, getting stuck in a "Not responding" dialog box that cannot be dismissed. I used the Hyper-V management console to reset the machine and it could not get out of resetting state.

I tried to save another Windows 2003 guest machine, and it would be progress with its Saving state (0%). The other running Windows 2003 guest was stuck in the logon dialog.

My first suspicion is perhaps one of the Windows update patches this week (10 Nov 2011) may something to do with it, which was still pending a system restart. Well, since I could not do anything with Hyper-V i proceeded with the Windows Update restart, and now it is stuck half an hour at

"Shutting down hyper-v virtual machine management service"

Prior to restarting I did not observe any hard disk errors reported in the system event log; doubt it is a disk-related condition.

Shall I force a hard reboot?

UPDATE

Ok so i left it hanging over an hour while attending to other matters, and thankfully the host cleanly restarted. I can operate the guest machines fine now. Phew.

Hyper-V must have been crawling for some reason. The VMs have been observed to become slow in the past when the host has been up for a long duration (two weeks to a month), but never this slow. Would love to know what types of performance monitoring items i can observe to give a hint why this can happen.

UPDATE 2012-02-13

In the months ever since, Hyper-V has stalled into this state another two times. It appears so randomly and without any error event logs to hint what is causing it enter this "drunkard" state. Just an Hyper-V management service timeout. 

Log Name:      System
Source:        Service Control Manager
Date:          13/2/2012 9:16:48 AM
Event ID:      7043
Task Category: None
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      elune
Description:
The Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management service did not shut down properly after receiving a preshutdown control.
Event Xml:
<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
  <System>
    <Provider Name="Service Control Manager" Guid="{555908d1-a6d7-4695-8e1e-26931d2012f4}" EventSourceName="Service Control Manager" />
    <EventID Qualifiers="49152">7043</EventID>
    <Version>0</Version>
    <Level>2</Level>
    <Task>0</Task>
    <Opcode>0</Opcode>
    <Keywords>0x8080000000000000</Keywords>
    <TimeCreated SystemTime="2012-02-13T01:16:48.882901900Z" />
    <EventRecordID>567844</EventRecordID>
    <Correlation />
    <Execution ProcessID="764" ThreadID="8484" />
    <Channel>System</Channel>
    <Computer>elune</Computer>
    <Security />
  </System>
  <EventData>
    <Data Name="param1">Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management</Data>
  </EventData>
</Event>

The only means out of it is to restart the system.

UPDATE This problem may never be answered given that I have recently nuked the server and installed Windows Server 2012 R2 afresh.

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  • well, the problem has risen again. is this going to be a once-per-month frequency for me?
    – icelava
    Dec 21, 2011 at 17:00
  • i escaped January, but February saw the return of the demon.
    – icelava
    Feb 13, 2012 at 2:12

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
2

The hotfix in Microsoft KB2263829 might solve this problem.

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1
  • The server already had that patch installed, long before the problem appeared.
    – icelava
    Mar 20, 2012 at 11:19
1

It sounds like some kind of serious glitch occured. At this point, a hard reboot is probably your only option.

As a side note, make sure you upgrade your BIOS to the latest revision (for microcode updates), and make sure the needed virtualization exetnsions are turned on. Same goes for drivers, particularly the drivers and firmware for your RAID controller and hard drives. And running a chkdsk /f wouldn't hurt either.

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2
  • I left it hanging around and it finally managed to restart itself. :-/
    – icelava
    Nov 10, 2011 at 15:58
  • Anyway just to be clear there is no apparent disk problems; the root partition works totally fine with all disks, while all the guest VMs stall. Then the root partition will take a tremendous long time to restart.
    – icelava
    Feb 14, 2012 at 3:05
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Are you running any other applications on the hyper-v host? I've seen this type of issue when there has been AV running on the host.

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1
  • Other than VisualSVN Subversion service, the host is just a Hyper-V host. And usually only myself uses it.
    – icelava
    Nov 10, 2011 at 16:12
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I had the same, the host server took about 20 - 30 minutes to shut down. This was because the hyper-v machines were running and the host needed to stop or pauze these first (and that was what took so long in my case).

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1
  • My case is the guest machines go unnaturally unresponsive and couldn't be saved or shut down.
    – icelava
    Feb 28, 2013 at 6:19

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