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PSA - For those running vmProtect against a Server 2008 VM

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We ran into an issue that took us down for the majority of a day yesterday, the cause of which was not immediately apparent. I wanted to share with this community our findings in case, by chance, someone else stumbles upon this via a Google search.

The VM in question is quite often backed up, every 30 minutes between 6am and 12am

Symptoms: After a reboot, our VM would come up for anywhere between 30 seconds and three minutes and then partially halt. The VM would continue to ping and for periods of time, shared drives would remain but any other application (in our case, this was a sql server) would cease functioning and any attempt to do anything with the GUI would be unresponsive.

Loading into Safe Mode allowed the VM to act completely normally, though looking at system and application logs - there was no indicated reason for the freezing.

A lot of hair pulling, experimentation, and google-fu eventually led me to a small blog that seemed to mirror our problem:

http://garysgambit.blogspot.com/2010/03/2008-server-freeze-hyper-v-or-v…
and
http://garysgambit.blogspot.com/2010/05/windows-2008-hyper-v-vss-backup…

Since the author has done a good job detailing the issue, I'll leave that for your perusal. Here's the gist.

Check your registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\STORAGE\Volume
If you have more than a handful of entries, this may be affecting you as well. In my case I had 30,000

Check the size of your SYSTEM registry hive at C:\windows\System32\config
If it's over 20ish MBs, this too may be an indicator that you are being hit by this.

Finally - fixing it:

Microsoft has a Hotfix available here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982210

A kind soul has created a tool to cleanup the phantom entries, available here:
http://bytesolutions.com/Support/Knowledgebase/KB_Viewer/ArticleId/35/D…

Hopefully you don't get stuck dealing with this... and if you do this gets you up faster and with less frustration than was the case for me.

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Posts: 22
Comments: 3800

Hi Viddywell,

Thank you very much for leaving this information here! It's quite interesting and definitely valuable. I assume this might happen since the quiesced snapshot initiated by VMware also triggers VSS inside the guest OS and therefore the Microsoft issue takes place.

Thank you.
--
Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis vmProtect Program Manager