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I have a Windows 10 VM on a VMWare ESXi (6.0.0, 4600944) server that occasionally will suddenly just "power off". I can be logged in and using it and the connection just breaks suddenly. Other VMs on the same server do not have this issue. No obvious timing or load issues.

The Windows event log is all normal events, then the gap while it's off, followed by the power up events.

The VMWare log simply states "powered off" with no description of how or why.

Not sure where to go on diagnosing this given how the event logs are so unhelpful. Ideas for debugging it?

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Have you checked the Windows logs? Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer -> Windows Logs. If the system shutdown itself for some reason there might be logs there telling you why. – gurka 3 hours ago
up vote 3 down vote

Maybe a dumb question, but is your windows 10 activated ? I'm not sure about that version, as I don't use Windows, but previous versions were shutting down after some time if they were not activated.

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Yes, it shows as activated in the System control panel. – Brian Knoblauch 9 hours ago
up vote 3 down vote

Check in your VM log. For that check in your datastore for file called vmware.log, and inspect them. (KB for locating the log: Locating virtual machine log files on an ESXi/ESX host (1007805))

See that other KB for the step to take after: Troubleshooting a virtual machine that has stopped responding (1007819)

That step is mostly the one you will have to follow :

Verify that the virtual machine is powered on. If the virtual machine has been powered off unexpectedly, power it back on and then troubleshoot the cause of the unexpected shutdown. For more information, see:

  • Powering on an ESX/ESXi host's virtual machine (1003738)
  • Determining why a virtual machine was powered off or restarted (1019064).

Determining why a virtual machine was powered off or restarted (1019064)

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Well, gave me more places to look, but same result. It was just suddenly not running. No errors logged, no shutdown logged. – Brian Knoblauch 5 hours ago
up vote 2 down vote

Migrate to another cluster, clone or rebuild it and see if it continues. Fortunately no other systems are having this issue so we can rule out hardware.

May have a scheduled task or patch (updates, drivers etc...) that is causing the issue. Remote scripts or software agents may be forcing your client to behave this way.

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