Scenario: Compaq ML350G3 / 2x2.8 xeon / 4 GB ram. Host OS Windows 2000 std sp4 with all hotfixes. Guest OS's: a mix of W2k std (msdn edition), Windows 2003 std. 6 Guest OS's running concurrently, and we've allocated a good bit of RAM, but we try to keep 400-500 MB free in the host's task mgr. VMWare GSX 2.5.1 #5336.
Problem is that the host server is rebooting randomly. Sometimes it will run for about a week, other times it quits after a few hours. The host drops and reboots hard, only error that it leaves in logs is the "previous shutdown was unexpected." Nothing curious in any of the VMware logs or the event logs of the VM's.
We've changed out hardware, looped diagnostics for days on the questionable equipment and found absolutely nothing. We turned off compaq's ASR and hyperthreading. We have clean electricity (data center). We rebuilt the host OS. Nothing we can do has seemed to help. Reboots appear at somewhat random times. Often in the middle of the night (little to no load), but sometimes in the middle of the day.
We had a project to deploy more VMware, but I can't until we can get this environment stable. Anybody have any thoughts? I just can't get it to cooperate with me!