Our Windows Server 2012 R2 VMware virtual machines have scheduled tasks defined to reboot them weekly using shutdown.exe /r and some of these servers fail to restart some of the time. When I connect to the server via VMRC I see a screen like this:
I have to power cycle the server to get it to work again. The System event log doesn't contain any errors. The last messages before shutdown are:
The IKE and AuthIP IPsec Keying Modules service entered the stopped state.
The kernel power manager has initiated a shutdown transition.
After power-cycling there is a message like this:
The last shutdown's success status was false. The last boot's success status was false.
I tried enabling boot logging, but there are no logs at all for the failed boot in %SystemRoot%\ntbtlog.txt. So either the problem occurs before the first log entry is written or it's actually failing to shut down.
If I manually reboot the server, including by running shutdown /r from a command prompt this works. What else can I do to troubleshoot this?
I ended up doing this by taking a VMware snapshot of the machine while frozen and then converting the .VMSN file to a .DMP file using the vmss2core tool. I had to use the
-W8option to get it to read my .VMSN file (-Wand-W9600didn't work).