VMWare Gray Screen, in the DDI / VDI / Desktop Delivery / Bladed PCs forum on BrianMadden.com

So it appears that randomly upon reboot my VMWare citrix servers will display just a gray screen in the VMWare console. I cannot issue a Ctrl-Alt-Del and I cannot issue any other type of command or connect via RDP/ICA. The memory on the VMWare is shown to be high at like 88% usage or greater. If I try to connect via ICA I get the general message saying: "Cannot connect to the Citrix PS Server". The server remains in this state until I hit the reset button in the VMWare console.

We are running Server 2003 with the latest patches. This has been going on for about 2 months now. VMWare version is 3.01.

Hi champ,

Are there any errors on your event log? Is the issue happening during shutdown or boot up?

From what I can see, there is a hung service that is unable to terminate.

Have you patched your Citrix farm?

Also, did you P2V these servers over to Vmware or did you build them from scratch?

Hi Jonathan

We have the same problem with w2k3 Citrix Server (PSE450W2K3R02) on VMware (3.5.0) by reboot the system.
We dont see any error in the log file.
We build this servers from new (VM-template) NO P2V.

Do you have any new soloution for this problem?

With your server, can you log into another computer and remotely connect to the services mgmt console and see which service is hung?

Also, is this just one server or does this happen on allot of servers?  I would check your NIC on your server also and maybe just make sure it is configured correctly, reinstall it maybe?

I can not think of anything else i am afraid.

You can count me as another with this exact same problem.   I'm getting ready to pay an outside company to come fix the damned thing....unless you had a solution that worked.

Hi,

I recalled another post from awhile ago where I came across an MS hotfix that resolved a similar issue:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/960092/en-us

Worth a shot...

What antivirus software do you have installed on these servers? Take one of the servers with the problem and remove the antivirus program. If the issue goes away, apply the hotfix suggested by Alan.

 

I've already applied the hotfix to all three of my VMs and they all three still crash.   I have a support ticket open with our VMWare support to work on this.  If I get a solution from them, I'll happily post it here.   I had both Server1 and Server 3 crash earlier this week, and Server2 crashed this morning.   This is a real nuisance.

These run Citrix XenApp 5.0 with all the hotfixes.   Our AV client is Trend OfficeScan.

 

You might want to consider rolling back some recent Windows updates - you can always reapply them if that doesn't help. I've got a list of about half a dozen MS security updates that I've held off on simply because other people reported issues with them which were resolved by rolling back the patch.