10

I have a virtual machine that constantly hangs in the “Stopping” state.

I’ve red several posts suggesting killing the vmwp.exe process of the machine but I’ve never been able to kill this process neither from the Windows Task Manager nor from an administrative command prompt by using prockill /PID xxxx /F where xxxx was the process ID. The only result that I have is that my machine enters in “Stopping-Critical” state.

Even worse, from that point (having a virtual machine hung at stopping) I am unable to manage (stop or start) any other virtual machine on the same host. The only “solution” in that case for me is to stop the Virtual Machine Management Service (vmms.exe) and to restart the physical host. Without first stopping the vmms.exe service my physical host also hangs during the restart.

Moreover, there is no any error logged in the Event Viewer.

I’ve found some other posts complaining about them problem. On all of them the only suggestion was to kill the vmwp.exe process, which obviously doesn’t work for them too.

Can somebody help us with this, pls?

Thanks

  • I have the same problem with Windows Server 2012. No solution yet? – Randall Flagg Jul 16 '17 at 06:34
  • This could be related to 1) a virtual switch attached to a bad driver of a physical NIC, or 2) RRAS installed on physical server, or 3) VM exposed to a pass-through disk. The chances of having the hang status are high when one of those is present. – Noor Khaldi Dec 19 '17 at 16:27

2 Answers2

2

The process VMWP.EXE can be killed like it's described here.

Also, it could be an issue which can be resolved by installing the latest Windows updates. Additionally, remote access may not have been configured properly and RRAS should be turned off - source.

batistuta09
  • 8,981
  • 10
  • 23
-1

Doing some research about this problem, I've found this.

I did kill a hung machine doing some very risky actions. I'm completely sure this is unsupported, but mine was a testing machine... so I took the chance. Besides a hung virtual machine, also the hyper-v service was unable to start.

Using process explorer I killed all the threads I could that were running in vm's worker process.

Then, in process explorer, I checked the handles opened by the process and closed all that were related to the file system, those that had the guid in the name or path...

After a few seconds of closing handles, suddenly the worker process disappeared and the I was able to start again the hyper-v service.

I'm sorry if this guide lack some serious step-by-step instructions. This worked for me and if you choose to end a hung vm using something like this, I hope it works. Patrick

Hope it helps.

(Source?)

mwfearnley
  • 816
  • 1
  • 11
  • 22
Facundo D. Baru
  • 11
  • 2
  • 1
    [When you find a useful resource that can help answer a question (from another site or in an answer on Server Fault) make sure you provide a link to the original page or answer](https://serverfault.com/help/referencing) - – HBruijn Sep 05 '18 at 13:38