So I have support tickets open with both vmWare and Microsoft, but thought I would ask here as well. I have a 5 server vSphere 5.0 farm, connected via Fiber Channel to a Dell Compellent SAN.
Randomly the windows guests (2008R2 and 2003R2) will have extreme performance issues, I will still be able to ping them but all other functions stop. (E-mail server stops delivering mail, Citrix servers are extremly slow, to being unusable, sessions just lockup.) Most of the time when I look at the gues the vmWare tools are still running, however if I go to the console and do a Ctrl-Alt-Delete to login to the server the login box never comes up the screen just shows the background. Very shortly after this the vmWare tools show as not running within vsphere.
The only solution is to hard power off the server and power it back up and then it works fine. This happens completly randomly, I can go weeks or even a few months without issue, or it can be a few days.
The performance tabs in vSphere never show any performance issues in either the guest or the host. Often times this issue will happen to several or all of the guests on 1 host. The virtual machines never blue screen, they simply just stopped responding.
I am also running Trend Micro Deep Security on the Vsphere servers and guests.
Any thoughts? I've had a vmWare ticket open for a while and have it escalated but they are scratching their heads, they asked me to open a ticket with Microsoft to see if they have any thoughts, I'm waiting for a response from them.