Windows Server 2012 Fail Upon Reboot – VM Hardware V10

Recently, I ran into an issue where servers running Windows 2012 Server R2 hardware version 10 would fail on reboot in our virtual infrastructure. There is a workaround to fix this issue without having to rollback to hardware version 9 if you are not in a position to upgrade to VMware ESXi 5.5 Update 3 or VMware ESXi 6.0 for that matter.

To work around this issue, you can do two things:

Add monitor_control.enable_softResetClearTSC = TRUE to the VM configuration parameters which applies the setting to the VM individually.

or

Add echo ‘monitor_control.enable_softResetClearTSC = “TRUE”‘ >> /etc/vmware/config to the host, which will apply this fix to all VMs running on the host.

IMPORTANT: You should NOT apply this at the host level if you are using Solaris VMs as there could be unexpected results such as; Solaris VMs hanging.

I will walk through the steps below to apply the setting at a VM level.

1. Log into vSphere Client
2. Right-click the virtual machine and click Edit Settings to open the Virtual Machine Edit Settings window.
3. Click VM Options. Select General, then Configuration Parameters.

 

4. Click Add Row.

5. Add monitor_control.enable_softResetClearTSC = TRUE