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Question
Friday, May 2, 2014 1:28 PM
I recently bought a new system, which works just fine. I installed Windows 2012 R2, installed a SSD drive and 3 Western Digital 4Tb Red drives. I've created my Storage pools and installed the hyper-v role. I've also patched Windows through the normal Windows update process. I started building the 1st VM machine on this system.
What I'm noticing is that the VM will tend to go into a critical state. If I stop it the machine will go into a stopping-critical state. If I leave the machine running it can sometimes go into a running-critical state. Restarting the host machine doesn't solve the problem. Restarting the Hyper-v server doesn't seem to resolve the issue either. And more importantly, it seems that the Hyper-v management interface refreshes VMs slowly. Note, the rest of Windows operates great. The switches and buttons inside Hyper-v respond fine, but the VMs don't work hardly at all. I've tried using generation 1 and generation 2 VMs, it doesn't tend to make much of a difference.
I thought at first that maybe my drives were just slow so I created a new VM on my SSD, which does something like 90,000 IOPS and tried it there. I get the same behavior. I think this issue looks like a coding problem with Hyper-v more so than an environment problem with Windows or the hardware.
Is this a known issue by Hyper-v? Why do VMs go into a critical state so often?What's the deal?
What logs are best to look at in this situation?
All replies (16)
Monday, May 19, 2014 7:05 AM ✅Answered
Hi,
I had a same problem. Try to disable network on VM settings under the Network adapter. Set the Virtual switch to "Not connected" and then try to start/shut down VM.
Do you use NIC teaming?
Wednesday, May 28, 2014 7:03 PM ✅Answered
Hi all,
I seemed to have solved this issue. I had Windows Home Essentials installed as a role along with Hyper-v. It seems the two do not play well together. I uninstalled Hyper-V, then I was able to assign the NIC to any VM and it responds quite quickly. I think the Windows Home Essentials role does something with lookup zones or something similar maybe, who knows exactly why it causes the problems. I just know that removing the role fixes Hyper-v. So, I'll create a VM as my Windows Home Essentials box and see if that works for me going forward. Thanks for all the help.
Friday, May 2, 2014 2:00 PM
Some material evidence is needed. Any error code and error detailes.
Description of possible cause and solution is here
Rgds
Milos
Friday, May 2, 2014 3:14 PM
When a VM goes into "critical' the absolute most common issue is storage related. And not speed of storage (there is a bunch of caching to handle disconnects, reconnects, etc.).
Ben's blog mentions the case of a loaded config and the storage connection is lost.
Considering that you see this on all your drives, consider power savings settings, or that your disks are being spun down and not waking up properly to perform writes or reads. Or the sleep state implemented by your BIOS or hard drive BIOS is too deep. In that case set S1 in the BIOS over S3.
Brian Ehlert
http://ITProctology.blogspot.com
Learn. Apply. Repeat.
Disclaimer: Attempting change is of your own free will.
Friday, May 2, 2014 4:11 PM
Thanks to you both for the prompt response and help.
@Milos: I was hoping to give some material evidence, but what specifically do you think would help? What logs would be good? Does Hyper-v have specific log that might explain the *-Critical state, or is it best just to look inside the Windows Event Viewer logs for this.
@Brian: Also, very good suggestions. I downloaded the latest bios drivers last night. I plan to flash the drivers today. I think you are on to something here. I am using storage spaces in windows 2012. The Red brand of the Western Digital should prevent this kind of problem as they are specifically built for this type of application, so that has me concerned a bit. Also, the SSD drive should have low latency and low seek times, so that is also concerning.
The BIOS update is designed to help with Haswell processors, so perhaps there is an issue there.
I'll update after the BIOS update. Thanks again!
Monday, May 5, 2014 1:36 PM
Hi Delamater,
Has the problem been solved by BIOS update ?
Best Regards
Elton Ji
Monday, May 5, 2014 3:24 PM
Thank you so much for the follow up!
It seems nothing in life is ever easy. I tried to update the bios and an error "Can't open AsIO.sys (2)" prevented the update. Other than that, the system is fully functional. I have to put more work in on figuring out why ASUS's BIOS update tool didn't work.
Are there any tools you can think of that I can use to prove it is a storage problem? Maybe I can work the issue from that angle as well.
Monday, May 12, 2014 6:45 AM
Hi Delamater,
As for BIOS update please contact the hardware vendor .
Base on this state , I would suggest to do :
a. if there is any anti-virus software please remove it
b. uninstall and re-install hyper-v role
c. create a vm without VNIC and IDE/SCSI controller
d. create another vm without VNIC and install OS
Please check If they are all going to critical state .
Best Regards
Elton Ji
Friday, May 16, 2014 4:58 AM
Hi Delamater,
How are things going ?
Bset Regards
Elton Ji
Monday, May 19, 2014 3:59 AM
Hi!
Thanks a bunch for the follow up. I'm sorry for the delay, my company sent me out of the country for a bit of time there and I wasn't able to test. I plan on following the instructions provided in the next day or so. Thank you again for all the help, I'll post back when I have additional details.
Bob
Monday, May 19, 2014 1:23 PM
There might be something to that Medusa as on this motherboard I had to do some work to get the LAN drivers to work correctly. To answer your question, no, I haven't tried NIC teaming. I'll go read up on it and see what the benefits are. Thank you.
Wednesday, May 21, 2014 9:50 PM
Hi Medusa,
That seems to have done the trick. If I disable networking on the VM then I have no problems stopping or starting the VM at all. It's rather quick actually.
Did you ever happen to find a work around that allowed you to keep network connectivity?
Friday, May 23, 2014 4:01 PM
Hi Delamater,
If the BIOS can not be updated at present .
Did you try to add another Physical NIC for the HOST and diable the old one for troubleshooting ?
Best Regards
Elton Ji
Friday, May 23, 2014 4:09 PM
Hi Elton,
I'm guessing the problem is with Intel's decision to not produce a driver under the Windows 2012 server achitecture for the LAN driver on a consumer brand motherboard. I had to use this post to even get the NIC drivers to work correctly.
I can still work on getting the BIOS flashed, but I think the real issue is with the network driver itself. I was hoping there was an easier way to get around this. I'd be open to purchasing a NIC card an installing it if I knew one that would specifically work.
Honestly, a LAN driver shouldn't be this difficult to install. It's pretty frustrating to have this be a point of concern during this implementation. I've also found that Hyper-v doesn't play well when Windows Essentials is installed either. So far, Hyper-v seems harder to deal with than ESX Server.
Sunday, June 1, 2014 6:58 PM
I've solved this problem with assigning separate NIC to host server and separate to two other VMs which are running on it. In my opinion this is some kind of bug. I'll try to re configure back once in the future when Microsoft will solve this issue.
Wednesday, September 9, 2015 12:52 PM
I have this same issue across a VM that was imported from a physical PC to VHDX and this also happens on machines that where created and spawned from a virtual environment. I have no teaming enabled on any of the vm's and also we're using server 2012's windows vpn. If I disable the network card on the VM and power it down, it shuts down immediately. It will also restart immediately.
But shutting down/restarting the machine will go into stopping state. And if I use process explorer to kill the VM ID I will loose connection to the VM Manager, for a few hours, and when it comes back the stuck VM will be in stopping-critical state.
The only way to get the VM back up again - is to reboot se hyper-v host.