No response downtime for VMware platform Windows Server 2012

Our production servers are deployed on the VMware ESXi 5.5 platform, and in the last half-year time, occasionally there is no response (unresponsive) to the server operating system for Windows Servre 2012, and in the event of a problem, The server has some of the following symptoms:

1: The application cannot access the SQL Server database, and the connection error is returned by using Microsoft SQL Server Management sutdio to test the connection database.

2: There are times when the network can ping, sometimes ping is not the case.

3: The remote connection cannot access the server, and after entering from the VMware vSphere client, try to enter the system from the console of the server without any response. Failure to enter the system is essentially a case of downtime.

4: The problem is random, there is no rule can be said, sometimes separated by a month to appear once, sometimes a long time to appear.

in this case, only within the VMware vSphere client, select the server, right-click to select the "Power" option, and then power off, restart the power to resolve. No valuable error information can be obtained by analyzing the logs of the server and virtual machines. Later colleagues in the VMware Official forum found that many people have encountered this situation in Windows Server VM becomes unresponsive/vw Tools "not Running". the authorities have not given any conclusions, and personal feedback is due to Symantec's antivirus software (Symantec Endpoint Protection Anti-Virus), as follows:

Question to all that is having the the problem. Do you have SEP (Symantec Endpoint Protection) anti-virus installed on these servers?

i had similar issue and After doing a lot of tracing and log reviewing I noticed then every one of my servers that froze had a SEP definition Upda Te and within 3 minutes the server froze and had to is hard power off and back on.  If you have SEP installed check T He SEP client log under Applications and Services logs in Event Viewer and see if you notice a gap between when the server Froze and when do rebooted the server.  this log entry time would correspond with time entries in the system and app Lication logs within 3 minutes or so, you have no entries until you rebooted the server.

My resolution is to uninstall SEP from the servers and I has not had anymore freeze since. I don ' t know if something change in SEP but my servers have had Sep on them for years and never encounter this problem unti L early February and then I were getting 1-2 frozen servers each week until I uninstalled SEP and I had not had another FR Eeze since early March.

If somebody thinks it ' s something else I ' m all ears but SEP is the only commonality (within 3 minutes of a SEP update) my  Servers had in common. The one thing I was to point out is so all my unresponsive servers were still pingable and nothing else was responding, No Cntl-alt-del, no RDC, nothing.

One person feedback to VMware and Microsoft, did not find out the cause and solution, later found that the problem of the server installed Sep client 12.1.2.x, followed by Symantec's technical support, required to update the latest Sep client 12.1.6.x, There's really no problem back there. As shown below:

Re:windows Server VM becomes unresponsive/vw Tools "not Running"

Copelsimo1 2016-5-10 6:09 (reply Robby68)

Hi to all.

In my company we have the same Issue:random unresponsive server (2012/2012R2)

We have ESXI 6.0 UP.2

We opened different support request (VmWare, Microsoft, etc) but no one tell us what this happened, and no solution.

Then crossing different tables from the different console, I noticed that all unresponsive server had same Sep version (12.1.2 . x).

So I open a technical call to Symantec, and meantime I started to distribute last update of the SEP client (at time 12.1.6.x). This update require a system reboot and so only 30-40% of systems has been updated in the first step.

Symantec tell me we had old version of SEP, and requested US full Microsoft dump to analize (but this require reboot,too!) As well as update all client version.

No one server with last SEP version (21.1.6.x) got unresponsive.

At the end, Symantec confirm US problem is right in SEP version:

@-Fix id:3590578

@ Symptom:system freezes due to a deadlock on File System auto-protect driver after updating virus definitions.

@ solution:modified File System auto-protect driver to avoid this deadlock.

So, upgrading SEP to the last VERSION, problem SOLVED.

I hope to the helped.

Simone

Alba (CN)

Our system administrator has upgraded the Symantec Endpoint Protection Anti-Virus Client for all servers that have encountered this situation, and for the time being, it is not certain that this problem can really be solved, and it will need to be verified by a few minutes.

------------------------------------------------------------PS 2017-01-06 Add the following content --------------------- ---------------------------------------

Since the server's Symantec Endpoint Protection Anti-Virus client has been upgraded, from 2016-10-20 to today 2017-01-06 has been a few months, have not experienced downtime, it seems to be the result of this problem. You can come to a conclusion!

No response downtime for VMware platform Windows Server 2012