Hyper-V Virtual Machine won’t respond over network

hyper-vwindows-server-2008

Recently, one of our Hyper-V virtual machines has periodically stopped responding over the network. It seems to be happening every few days, and it occasionally happens up to several times a day. I am by no means a sysadmin, so any direction you guys could provide would be very welcome. I've included everything I know to include below. If you need any additional information, I'll be glad to include it.

  • I can connect through the Hyper-V console.
  • I can't connect to network shares, IIS web apps, using RDP, or using ping.
  • Memory usage seems to be normal (3 of 4 GB)
  • Processor usage seems low.

  • We don't know the exact time the server goes down, but the following error appears consistently around the time it goes down:

    Error 5719, NETLOGON
    This computer was not able to set up as secure session with a domain controller in domain *** due to the following:
    There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request.
    This may lead to authentication problems. Make sure that this computer is connected to the network. If this problem persists, please contact your domain administrator.

EDIT

Here's a few details I missed during the initial post.

  • Both the Hyper-V server and the VM are running Windows Server 2008 Standard.
  • There are 6 VMs on the Hyper-V server, all sharing one external virtual network that runs on a gigabit adapter.
  • The problem seems to be isolated to this one VM.
  • At least one of the other VMs on the server is fairly high load.

Best Answer

It sounds like there's an issue with the virtual NIC and/or the interacting of a piece of software with the virtual NIC. Here are a few things you can try, but my money is probably on the antivirus/firewall product.

  1. Do all of your VM's have the same antivirus product? Verify that your antivirus/firewall product spcefically supports Server 2008 with Hyper-V, if not, try a different (or temporarily removing if feasible) your anti-virus/firewall product as a test to see if the issue goes away. This was the culprit on our systems, every 24-48 hours a seemingly random VM would lose connectivity until it was rebooted.

  2. Verify that your antivirus product in the management/parent OS has the appropriate folder and process exclusions (MS Article ID: 961804)

  3. Try disabling NIC offload functions such as Large Send Offload & CheckSum Offload in the VM network adapter, they are enabled by default in Windows, but its possible your hardware NIC doesn't support it (or doesn't interact well with Hyper-V) which can cause performance problems and network errors. There are a number of ways to do this, but the quickest for testing purposes is to (within the VM) open up the NIC adapter properties, go to the advanced tab, and disable the offload functions in the list, then reboot the VM. (MS Article ID: 951037) This one seems to be a fairly common issue. You'll probably also see errors on your network switches on the associated ports if it's a problem.

Related Topic