I have a Windows 10 VM on a VMWare ESXi (6.0.0, 4600944) server that occasionally will suddenly just "power off". I can be logged in and using it and the connection just breaks suddenly. Other VMs on the same server do not have this issue. No obvious timing or load issues.
The Windows event log is all normal events, then the gap while it's off, followed by the power up events.
The VMWare log simply states "powered off" with no description of how or why.
Not sure where to go on diagnosing this given how the event logs are so unhelpful. Ideas for debugging it?
edit
It's now impacting a total of 3 VMs on 3 different VMWare hosts. 2 of the VMs are Windows Server OS based terminal servers. Hardware is different on all 3 hosts. The only thing in common that I'm seeing at the moment is that they all do a lot of traffic over remote desktop service.
Check in your VM log. For that check in your datastore for file called vmware.log, and inspect them. (KB for locating the log: Locating virtual machine log files on an ESXi/ESX host (1007805))
See that other KB for the step to take after: Troubleshooting a virtual machine that has stopped responding (1007819)
That step is mostly the one you will have to follow :
Determining why a virtual machine was powered off or restarted (1019064)
Maybe a dumb question, but is your windows 10 activated ? I'm not sure about that version, as I don't use Windows, but previous versions were shutting down after some time if they were not activated.
Migrate to another cluster, clone or rebuild it and see if it continues. Fortunately no other systems are having this issue so we can rule out hardware.
May have a scheduled task or patch (updates, drivers etc...) that is causing the issue. Remote scripts or software agents may be forcing your client to behave this way.
VMWare released a patch to specifically fix this issue of VMs suddenly going to power off with nothing logged. So, there was indeed nothing to find...