I’ve been using VMWare Workstation to play around with various OSes for a while but a few weeks ago I started over from scratch and decided to be semi serious in order to try to get more advanced with Active Directory administration. Ever since I promoted my Server 2012 R2 to be a domain controller (started from scratch with a new forest and everything) and joined my Server 2008R2, Windows 7 and Windows XP VMs to the domain, I have one big issue. No matter what Windows based VM I am in, It will randomly freeze up for about 3 or 4 minutes, and while VMWare is still active and functional the individual VMs aren’t. I can toggle between the different VMs, but as soon as I perform one mouse click, everything freezes. All of the commands (ie attempt to close out a window, then attempt to click the start menu, then attempt to send a ctrl alt del command) stack and then execute one after another in a second or two after everything becomes unfrozen. I don’t do anything specific to regain functionality, just wait it out for a few minutes. If I happen to have non Windows based VMs powered on, they are frozen too, just at a black screen.
Host Machine:
Windows 10 Pro
VMWare Workstation 12.1 Pro
Intel Core i7 Extreme (Hexacore 4th gen 4960X)
32 GB DDR3 RAM
GeForce 770
Intel 730 480 GB SSD/Seagate Barracuda 2 TB HDD (VMWare is on the SSD, all VMs live on the HDD)
Six VMs:
Windows Server 2012R2 Datacenter (Domain Controller, DNS)
Windows Server 2008R2 Enterprise (SQL Server, future Sharepoint Server)
Windows 7 SP1 Pro
Windows XP SP3 Pro
Fedora Core 23
OS X 10.11.3 El Capitan
All VMs are two processors, two cores each. The two servers have 100GB SATA HDDs and 6GB of RAM each. The four workstations have 80 GB HDDs and 5 GB of RAM each, except for the XP VM which I configured with 2. All OSes at this point are still mostly stock, except for XP, which I applied the registry trick so I can still get monthly security patches.
- To my recollection this only started happening after adding those other virtual PCs to the domain
- I usually don’t have more than 2 or 3 VMs powered up simultaneously.
- No events are triggered in the Event Viewers of my host PC or any of the individual VMs
Any help would be appreciated, I'm not really sure where to begin. I really don't want to demote/decommission the Server 2012R2 domain controller and put everything back in a workgroup and try it all over again.
Host Machine:
Windows 10 Pro
VMWare Workstation 12.1 Pro
Intel Core i7 Extreme (Hexacore 4th gen 4960X)
32 GB DDR3 RAM
GeForce 770
Intel 730 480 GB SSD/Seagate Barracuda 2 TB HDD (VMWare is on the SSD, all VMs live on the HDD)
Six VMs:
Windows Server 2012R2 Datacenter (Domain Controller, DNS)
Windows Server 2008R2 Enterprise (SQL Server, future Sharepoint Server)
Windows 7 SP1 Pro
Windows XP SP3 Pro
Fedora Core 23
OS X 10.11.3 El Capitan
All VMs are two processors, two cores each. The two servers have 100GB SATA HDDs and 6GB of RAM each. The four workstations have 80 GB HDDs and 5 GB of RAM each, except for the XP VM which I configured with 2. All OSes at this point are still mostly stock, except for XP, which I applied the registry trick so I can still get monthly security patches.
- To my recollection this only started happening after adding those other virtual PCs to the domain
- I usually don’t have more than 2 or 3 VMs powered up simultaneously.
- No events are triggered in the Event Viewers of my host PC or any of the individual VMs
Any help would be appreciated, I'm not really sure where to begin. I really don't want to demote/decommission the Server 2012R2 domain controller and put everything back in a workgroup and try it all over again.