We have been running our main Windows 2008 SP1 production file and license server as a ProxMox VM for some time. Mostly I've been impressed with the performance and the ability to move the VM to another Proxmox host when we needed to.
The problem is unreliable booting/restarting of the Windows VM after we do Windows Updates. Earlier this year, after Windows automatically downloaded and installed updates, the VM could not reboot. The VNC console showed the initial booting texts, then the Windows splash screen with the little green crawling line .... then a black screen, and CPU utilization pegged at 100%, forever. We could use the web console to stop the VM, and when we restarted it Windows complained about problems and gave the usual option of "repair" or "normal start". The Repair option does load but since we don't have saved images for it to recover (we back up the VM with snapshots using Proxmox), that didn't get us anywhere. Eventually it did decide to boot normally, but today, after it installed several Windows security updates, the same thing occurred. By using "f8" at the VNC console to get the option for "Safe Mode", and restarting in that mode a couple of times, it eventually booted normally, although before permitting a login, the screen showed that it was reverting all the failed security updates.
Upshot is: all the advantages of having a VM and snapshots to revert to earlier conditions, or the ability to bring up the VM on a backup server, are far less relevant than being able simply to run Windows 2008 and let it do updates when it needs to, without biting my nails that it will refuse to start. I'm not here to gripe: I'm looking for suggestions as to what would improve the reliability of a Win2k8 VM, and if anybody else has had similar experiences. Thanks!
The problem is unreliable booting/restarting of the Windows VM after we do Windows Updates. Earlier this year, after Windows automatically downloaded and installed updates, the VM could not reboot. The VNC console showed the initial booting texts, then the Windows splash screen with the little green crawling line .... then a black screen, and CPU utilization pegged at 100%, forever. We could use the web console to stop the VM, and when we restarted it Windows complained about problems and gave the usual option of "repair" or "normal start". The Repair option does load but since we don't have saved images for it to recover (we back up the VM with snapshots using Proxmox), that didn't get us anywhere. Eventually it did decide to boot normally, but today, after it installed several Windows security updates, the same thing occurred. By using "f8" at the VNC console to get the option for "Safe Mode", and restarting in that mode a couple of times, it eventually booted normally, although before permitting a login, the screen showed that it was reverting all the failed security updates.
Upshot is: all the advantages of having a VM and snapshots to revert to earlier conditions, or the ability to bring up the VM on a backup server, are far less relevant than being able simply to run Windows 2008 and let it do updates when it needs to, without biting my nails that it will refuse to start. I'm not here to gripe: I'm looking for suggestions as to what would improve the reliability of a Win2k8 VM, and if anybody else has had similar experiences. Thanks!