Boy, my experience in general couldn't be more different. With very few exceptions almost always caused by a failed service or something else in the OS, our VMs restart extremely quickly. To the point of being surprisingly quick - as in, "Did I actually restart it of did I just log off?" More than once I've had to go check the logs just to make sure I did restart.
A couple of VMs I inherited used to boot very slowly (in the 10 minute range), but when I updated the tools and installed the VMXNet NIC driver the problem went away on those. I've also never had problems with the tools requiring multiple reboots. That seems really odd. I've had two or three instances where I had to uninstall the tools completely, restart, re-install the tools, then restart a final time. I don't remember the specifics of why this was necessary, but something went awry when updating the tools and this was the way to fix it. I would definitely check that the VMXNet driver is installed if you don't have a specific reason for not using it. From: Kim Longenbaugh [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2009 9:30 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Virtual servers taking a long time to restart Most of the time when we see that here, it's because the VMWare Tools on the Windows guest are in the process of updating or installing. Our experience, contrary to what might be expected, has been that the install doesn't complete in one fell swoop, but seems to dribble out over a number of restarts. It's taken up to a week before a guest settles down and restarts with the more typical speed. Plus, even with "seasoned" guests, the problem will still occurs when VMWare patches, including but not limited to, VMTools patches, are applied to the EXS hosts. ________________________________ From: James Rankin [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2009 8:24 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Virtual servers taking a long time to restart Does anyone else have any issues with odd VMWare ESX 3.5 virtual systems taking a long time to restart? I have a lot of problems (seem to becoming more frequent) with machines that sit on the "starting Windows" screen for a long time (up to half an hour), or some that even have to be manually reset. Usually on the reset they come up quick and nice. These are mostly Server 2003 and odd Server 2008 machines running on ESX 3.5 with an IBM SAN. TIA, JRR -- "On two occasions...I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." http://raythestray.blogspot.com ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
