Vista - Virtual Machine Hangs

Hi -

We have a W2K3 R2 Enterprise Edition server with a dual quad core Xeon and
16 GB ram running Virtual Server 2005 R2. It is running 5 Virtual Machines.

Every so often one of the virtual machines, always the same one, will hang.
It is non responsive to input. It stops responding to heart beats, and there
is no network i/o or disk i/o. The only way to get it to respond is to reset
it or turn it off.

We tried deleting the entire VM and re-creating it. The new VM does the
exact same thing.

The VM is running W2K8 with RRAS and NAT roles, and two network interfaces.

We are at a loss for what to do, and I haven't been able to find anything on
the Internet to explain this.

Any ideas?

Note, we have other W2K8 VMs running without a problem. We are also running
several W2K3 R2 VMs without a problem as well.

"Justin" wrote:

What does the networking look like on your physical server? Are all your VMs
sharing the same NIC? Or does each one have a dedicated physical NIC to
connect to? It's really easy to have an overloaded NIC cause these kinds of
issues, and that particular VM is performing a role where it would be very
sensitive to it.

Also, you'll likely want to make sure that any physical NICs involved have
their advanced properties (TCP Offload, Tophat, etc.) turned OFF in the
registry.

--
Charlie.
http://msmvps.com/blogs/xperts64
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/charlie.russel

"Justin" <Justin@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:93113E08-28A3-4FE1-839B-9FFA0F351D90@xxxxxx

Hi Charlie -

Host machine has two connections, one to Internet and one to Interal LAN.

Each of the VMs has a connection to Internal LAN. This VM has one additional
connection to the Internet NIC.

On the host machine, TCPIP is disabled on the Internet NIC, as is everything
except Virtual Machine sharing..

"Charlie Russel - MVP" wrote:

Well, if all your machines are sharing a single NIC for the internal LAN,
you're definitely pushing up against some problems there. The general rule
for a production system is one physical NIC for one virtual NIC. I'd start
by adding at least one extra physical NIC, put it on the same subnet as the
Internal LAN, and connect the problem VM to that new NIC. NICs, even server
quality NICs, are relatively inexpensive. (I've started ordering physical
machines that will be VM hosts with quad-NIC PCIe or PCI-X cards in them,
especially as we move to the faster synthetic virtual NICs of Hyper-V.)

--
Charlie.
http://msmvps.com/blogs/xperts64
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/charlie.russel

"Justin" <Justin@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:2F94794E-749B-4FC1-A84D-F137029AFED5@xxxxxx

Hi Charlie -

Thanks. Any suggestions for professional server quality NICs? This is a Dell
poweredge server with a 2 port intel gigabit nic right now.

Justin

"Charlie Russel - MVP" wrote:

I'm partial to Intel NICs, personally. Though HP has a very aggressively
priced 4 port GigE NIC that I've used and been pleased with. Still, when
buying for a server other than HP, I generally buy Intel NICs, making sure
to opt for their server grade ones.

--
Charlie.
http://msmvps.com/blogs/xperts64
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/charlie.russel

"Justin" <Justin@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:16AD55C9-24A0-4136-A5A2-2B661F823A5F@xxxxxx