I'm hoping there are some good ideas out there on how we might find the source and solution to our problem. This issue has us stopped in our tracks. We use full clones and we are in the process of doing in-place upgrading of Windows 10 from 1803 to 1809. We have deployed fresh installs of 1809 without any problems. Our initial testing of the in place upgraded VM's looked good but now that we have heavy usage on them, we have found a problem. VMware support has indicated that they only suggest fresh installs and to not try in-place upgrading but we really need this ability.
Setup:
- Horizon 7.8
- ESXi 6.5
- Full clones with persona management and folder redirect
The problem presents itself as the following...(this problem could happen once a week or as bad as multiple times a day)
- If the user is actively on the VM, they notice what appears to be a slowing down of their VM. Programs like Excel may crash, Chrome eventually indicates that it cannot access the Internet and they may get to a point where they cannot open programs or get windows to respond correctly.
Things we have noticed...
1. This is random. We have only been able to reproduce it ourselves once. We left Chrome going with multiple website (CNN, leakspin, Gmail) and a couple days later Windows was misbehaving.
2. vSphere still shows that VMTools and the View Agent as "running".
3. We are able to ping the computers IP address and usually HTML or Horizon client connections still open the VM.
4. Windows does not respond to much. For example, we can send Cntrl-Alt-Del and get the windows blue screen to come up but we cannot get Task Manager to open.
5. A remote systeminfo command shows available memory and CPU as fine.
6. When attempting to open a couple programs yesterday, it took hours before the VM brought the program up.
We took a snapshot of the Test VM that started doing this, encase it is possible to recover it to a broken state. If we shutdown and startup the VM, it will behave correctly for an unpredictable number of days.
Thoughts on how we might find the needle in a haystack on this one?