MS Office 2003 problems on Proxmox 2.0

CTCcloud

CTCcloud

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Apr 6, 2012
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I couldn't find anything similar in the forums for this. We are converting XenServer vms over to Proxmox 2.0. After converting a couple of customers, we got a complaint that they couldn't open MS Word to be able to paste into it. We checked into it and sure enough if you launched MS Word 2003 directly it would open a partially drawn window, stop, and freeze up unresponsive holding 50% of CPU and never go anywhere and you'd have to force it closed. At first we thought that this was just unique to this customer but after going to a couple of other VMs on the same Proxmox 2.0 server we found that Word was acting the same in those. So we had the idea of installing Microsoft Office 2003 Professional fresh in a fresh Windows 2003 Server VM on Proxmox that was not a conversion. We had the exact same problem on the fresh install. We had thought it might be a normal.dot issue but the issue exists on many VMs including the fresh install so we can't be talking about corruption. We had thought it might be the fault of Adobe Acrobat Standard 9.0 but it's not common to all VMs with this issue.

I've tried the VM with just an ide driver for the disk instead of the RedHat Virtio driver and that didn't make a difference. I tried different video card drivers and that didn't make a difference either. We've found that Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Office 2010 both work just fine but switching to one of those for all customers involved is not an option as many will have big problems with the stupid "Ribbon" interface in the newer versions of Office.

Proxmox 2.0 is on a Dell 2950 with 2 Quadcore 5400 series Xeon processors with 32 GB of RAM. This machine is the master node in a cluster of 2 machines with a Dell 1950 as the secondary cluster node.

At this point we are stopped as far as converting from Xen to Proxmox because of this so any suggestions/answers would be greatly appreciated and much desired.

Thanks in advance,

Kyle
 
This is an update to the problem. I've verified that Word starts fine when the Windows 2003 Server VM is started in safe mode. This clearly indicates a virtual "piece of hardware" that is the offender here. I'm still banging my head against the wall here to figure this out. Any help? Please?

Thanks,

Kyle
 
My gut feeling is that networking - which net driver you use for the guest? virtio net ?
Also do you customize anything, like activate balloon memory etc..
Did you check in the window machine control panel to see any device that is reported malfunction?
 
i can confirm this problem. I use proxmox 2.0 since the beta and befor kernel 2.6.32.7 i was able to use office 2003. After that it hangs directly after the start. We also have similar problems with our merchandis managment. The installer hang at 50% CPU. And we are sure that the installer worked a few weeks ago.

We could say it must be a Microsoft update but i tried a fresh Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit install without updates and had the same problems with the merchandis managment and office 2003.

VM configuration:
CPU: 1CPU 2Core Qemu (also tried "host")
RAM: 2048MB
Disk: IDE
NIC: e1000


i will try to use an older kernel today and report the results
 
The kernel 2.6.32-6-pve works. Office and the merchandis management are working fine.

So the problem seems to be somewhere in the kernel since 2.6.32.7. Iam not that kernel hero to say where exactly but i hope that the proxmox team will find and fix it :)
 
Can you start Word in safe mode? (just start with "winword.exe /safe")

I am not a windows expert so I suggest you should ask MS how to debug this.
 
I can't start Word in safe mode. Same problem.

The eventlog of the VM and the logs of the host keep silence.

I tried to change the configuration of the merchandis management software (http://www.microtech.de) and got some dcom errors. 0x80040708 and 0x80004005. Google said that it should be a permission error but i checked this and i can say that its not a configuration error of windows. But it could be a .net function wich cause this problems with this kernels. .Net is used by office and the software. But i am only an administrator and no programmer :)
 
I tested this situation on a VM in our datacenter. It works with the newest kernel.

Hardware inhouse (don't work)
CPU: Intel Q6600
Board: Tyan S5191
Raid: 3ware 9550SX PCI-X

Hardware datacenter (work)
CPU: Xeon X3450
Board: Supermicro X8SIL
Raid: Areca ARC-1880

Proxmox version and kernel are the same. No selfmade changes on the host system.
 
miwalein said:
I tested this situation on a VM in our datacenter. It works with the newest kernel.

Hardware inhouse (don't work)
CPU: Intel Q6600
Board: Tyan S5191
Raid: 3ware 9550SX PCI-X

Hardware datacenter (work)
CPU: Xeon X3450
Board: Supermicro X8SIL
Raid: Areca ARC-1880

Proxmox version and kernel are the same. No selfmade changes on the host system.
Click to expand...
Hi,
strange... what cpu-type do you use in the VM? host, or on both standard (qemu)?

Udo
 
I also did some tests:

Not working (tried all virtual CPU types):
CPU: Intel X 3050

Working. just as expected:
CPU: AMD Neo N36L
 
i have a similar problem, but with SAGE SAARI Server who can't be setup in a fresh VM Win2003 or Win2008
 
Out of interest, has anyone tried switching the VGA device type? I don't see it mentioned, and it sounds stupid if you're using RDP, but it might be worth a try.
 
I tried qemu as well as host on both.

I will now download the fresh installed VM from the datacenter to my local proxmox system. Just to be sure.

p.s. the Datacenter server is a 2.0 release installation, the other system is an upgrade from beta.
 
tin said:
Out of interest, has anyone tried switching the VGA device type? I don't see it mentioned, and it sounds stupid if you're using RDP, but it might be worth a try.
Click to expand...

i tried to switch the VGA device but it doesn't effect anything.

And i don't think that it is a CPU problem. Maybe ACPI or other parts of the chipset. But it's only a feeling.
 
I've tried pretty much everything. The only thing I hadn't tried that has been talked about in this forum is changing the kernel to an older kernel. I've changed network card back and forth between virtio and Intel e1000. I've change video card type. I've changed the hard drive between virtio and ide. I've tried disabling loading of drivers and services and nothing has worked at this point.

It definitely could be a kernel config issue. If a previous kernel worked and now the newer does not then likely there was some small change in the config or drivers that has caused this issue. The fact is that MS 2003 Office is not at fault here as it works perfect on other virtual platforms in the same virtual machine.

By the way, Proxmox 2.0 is an excellent platform, keep up the good work guys...not that is doesn't need some improvements but overall it's very good. Thanks for a great piece of software.
 
miwalein said:
The kernel 2.6.32-6-pve works. Office and the merchandis management are working fine.

So the problem seems to be somewhere in the kernel since 2.6.32.7. Iam not that kernel hero to say where exactly but i hope that the proxmox team will find and fix it :)
Click to expand...

Does anybody have the kernel 2.6.32-6-pve? I have trouble with Word and Exel on w2k3 too.
 
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