Why are my Virtual Server 2005 VM's going to saved state all on their own?

Question

I am running Windows Server 2003 host OS. On that I have Windows Virtual Server 2005 R2 installed. I have two VMs running on this machine. The VM's had been running fine for months. Now it seems that every day they shut down on their own. Actually, they go to the saved status not the off status. I have checked the server event view and while there are some info messages there are no errors or nothing saying why the VM's were saved. Here is part of the log leading up to one of the servers being saved:

7/10/2009 9:10:01 AM Virtual Machine "USTAWVQA2" was saved.

7/10/2009 9:09:50 AM Setting Change The setting "hardware/bios/time_bytes" for the virtual machine configuration "USTAWVQA2" was changed.

7/10/2009 9:09:47 AM Setting Change The setting "settings/configuration/saved_state/path/absolute" for the virtual machine configuration "USTAWVQA2" was changed from NULL to "C:\Virtual Machines\VirtualQA2\USTAWVQA2.vsv".

7/10/2009 9:09:47 AM Setting Change The setting "settings/configuration/saved_state/path/relative" for the virtual machine configuration "USTAWVQA2" was changed from NULL to ".\USTAWVQA2.vsv".

Any insight into this would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Apparently there was a memory issue. The nightly backup would run which would reek havoc on the host PC's RAM. It seems that it got low enough for Virtual Server to shut down the guest machines. Of course, the log doesn't say anything about this.

I verified this is whats happening by reducing the memory foot print of each VM in half. They ran with no shutdowns after that for several weeks.