VMware Tools, Windows 7 and Random Reboots
I’ve been having an issue with VMware Tools, since I moved over to vSphere4.1. What happens is this. If you do a typical installation after a clean installation of Windows 7 (and I believe W2K8) then midway through the installation the VM is randomly, and arbitrarily rebooted. Of course in a busy day where you doing far to many different things at once, it’s one that easily missed. So convinced of this that I decide to install a fresh copy of Windows 7 and then snapshotted it before making any changes. I then video’d the entire experience. The reboot happens at around 4min and 40second. You might as well scroll to that point unless you want to watch the most tedious video on YouTube!
Anyway, I took the same VM. Reverted the snapshot, and decided to custom installation of the VMware Tools. This time NOT including the SVGA Driver from the installation routine. Hey, presto VMware Tools installs with an arbitrary reboot. It was thought that vSphere4.1 fixed problems with VMware Tools and this pesky SVGA driver. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. I first picked up on this issue from the rather excellent blog from Jason Boche:
http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2010/03/28/windows-2008-r2-and-windows-7-on-vsphere/
And became concerned about it because of problems it introduce with vSphere4.0 U2 and PCoIP – a little bit later it gave me PanoLogic evaluation some additional funkiness I would rather have lived without.
For my money I think the KB article – http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1011709 which talks about not installing the SVGA driver STILL applies. Watch out for automatic updates and VUM upgrades which might not read VMware KB Articles…
I think this issue is the real source of the deployment problems I’ve been having recently.
[UPDATE: Sadly, this is the case. And I still have cloning Win7 issues with vSphere4.1]
Anyway, I’m going to be experimenting with my new template (which doesn’t include the SVGA driver) over the next couple of days. And I will soon know if this is related or unrelated…
Incidentally, I thought I might try a clone of a VM without VMware Tools, and was surprised to find that Windows 7 REQUIRES VMware Tools in order to be cloned… It seems to be an issue with the Logical Volume Manager service. So when install VMware Tools, make sure you install it the right way, without a driver which can cause a random reboot! 
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August 2nd, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Speaking of VUM funk, I read another one recently but haven’t tested it first hand myself. If you use a custom partitioning scheme with ESX 4 (most people do), you can’t use VUM to upgrade ESX to new versions. I believe the outcome will be the creation of a single new mount point and all mount points which ESX uses stemming from that. The old mount points will remain but will be unused. Sounds like a mess to me.
August 3rd, 2010 at 9:51 pm
Mike — You said this: “Anyway, I’m going to be experimenting with my new template (which doesn’t include the SVGA driver) over the next couple of days.” Are you saying that you customized your VMware Tools install on your customization template?