vmware tools “not running” on windows 2008 VM
this is a particular issue that we struggled with for over 2 years. we had a windows 2008 standard VM used as a file server (for user home directories to be exact). the server was dedicated for that task.
the server began becoming unresponsive randomly sometimes several times a day sometimes once every few months. there was no rhyme or reason as to why this was occurring. the only clue we had was that vmware tools would display as “not running”. at this point there was no graceful way to shutdown the VM only a hard reset would work. during the time period when the VM became unresponsive end-users could not access the file share.
we tried all kinds of things…throwing additional hardware resources at it. uninstalling any non-vanilla install software. uninstalling and reinstalling the latest vmware tools. monitoring processes and resource consumption. per vmware support we tried installing a different video driver. we even rebuilt the server from scratch with windows 2008 R2 and just brought over the data volume. still the random lockups occurred.
at this point vmware support was at a loss. we ended up contacting microsoft support and after support analyzed a few memory dumps they concluded that a ccmexec.exe IO thread was stuck on the disk (involving the lsi_sas.sys driver). i googled to determine what ccmexec.exe was and discovered it was the SMS Agent Host service that is enabled by default in windows. i stopped the service and changed the service startup from automatic to manual. the problem has not since reappeared.
what’s puzzling is that we have other windows 2008 VMs that are file servers and don’t experience the issue. the only differing factor being that this particular server was using quota management, but i cannot conclusively say that was the cause. the version of vsphere was 4.x…
closest thing to a source:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/systemcenter/en-US/188e91a7-4bb6-45df-a5c8-223eaf79d6db/wmiprvseexesvchost-high-cpu-on-vmware-guests-resolved-by-stopping-sms-agent-host-service