Hi,
we have two VMWare ESXi 4.1 servers and we now had several issues (about once a month maybe), where VMs stopped working all of a sudden with the message "A virtual CPU has entered the shutdown state". This happened (mainly?) with Windows XP VMs. The VM is still shown as in running state, but not responding to anything but restart or stop from VMWare. The VM of which the log below is from, is a 4 vCPU Windows XP SP3 32bit with 3GB vRAM and one IDE and one SCSI vHDD, plus 2 vNICs. Nothing unusual I would think. VMWare ESXi 4.1 on different hardware, one Dell PE R710 with quad core Xeon CPU with hyperthreading, SAS HDDs, the other is a Core i7 with SSD and SATA HDDs.
While there is numerous threads on getting this error on boot or unanswered threads with similar issues, I could not yet find a solution, maybe someone can give me a hint.
The relevant part of the vmware.log is short (the last log lines before are of one week earlier):
Feb 05 05:07:48.756: vcpu-3| Triple fault.
Feb 05 05:07:48.757: vcpu-3| MsgHint: msg.monitorEvent.tripleFault (sent)
Feb 05 05:07:48.757: vcpu-3| A virtual CPU has entered the shutdown state. This caused a physical machine to restart. This response can be caused by an incorrect configuration of the virtual machine, a bug in the operating system, or a problem in the VMware ESX software.---------------------------------------
Feb 05 05:07:48.760: vcpu-3| CPU reset: hard (mode 2)
Feb 05 05:07:59.640: vmx| GuestRpcSendTimedOut: message to toolbox timed out.
Feb 05 05:07:59.640: vmx| GuestRpcSendTimedOut: message to toolbox-dnd timed out.
Feb 05 05:08:14.643: vmx| GuestRpcSendTimedOut: message to toolbox timed out.
Feb 05 05:08:14.644: vmx| GuestRpc: app toolbox's second ping timeout; assuming app is down
Feb 05 05:08:14.644: vmx| GuestRpcSendTimedOut: message to toolbox-dnd timed out.
Feb 05 05:08:14.644: vmx| GuestRpc: app toolbox-dnd's second ping timeout; assuming app is down
Feb 05 05:11:14.648: vmx| GuestRpcSendTimedOut: message to toolbox timed out.
Feb 05 05:11:14.649: vmx| Vix: [16754208 guestCommands.c:2468]: Error VIX_E_TOOLS_NOT_RUNNING in VMAutomationTranslateGuestRpcError(): VMware Tools are not running in the guest
Thanks a lot for any clues!