FYI windows updates run 7-15-2013, Virtualbox 4.0.16 dies
Posted: 19. Jul 2013, 16:34
Just a note in case someone else has an issue - so far not looking for help on it:
July 2013's host Windows updates may have hosed my running Virtualbox VM's - be careful this week with automatically-running guests on a Windows 7 host.
The story for the non-tldr-deficient readers:
I'm running Virtualbox 4.0.16 on a Windows 7 professional 64-bit host, with several guests: XP, 7, and an SBS2003. The guests all need to be running during the day and I have a script that save-states some guests and shuts others down for backups at night, with a host reboot on Monday nights.
I ran Windows Updates on Monday, July 15, 2013, during the day, expecting the reboot that night to finish the updates. One of the save-state scripts that evening failed with the guest window going dead-fish white and saying Not Responding in the window title bar. Closing the window made a Windows 7 error box "Virtualbox GUI has stopped responding. yadayadayada". I crashed and restarted that guest, reset the backup script and left the host to run the backups next night. The Windows Updates were not finished running, the host still needed a reboot.
Next night I got another guest failing to save-state. I crashed that one and tried again. 3rd night I shut down a guest manually and had the guest window go Not Responding after the shutdown process occured. I killed that guest's window, then noticed all of my other still-running guests, including the SBS2003, had gone dead white Not Responding, even though I hadn't done anything to them. The guests that had remote-log-in capabilities were not accesible, but the Processes were still active in Process Explorer. After killing everything, I rebooted the host. Everything started back up fine, but it was really strange. This had never happened to me before, and may just be a coincidence. Not sure, but better safe than sorry.
Lesson for me: don't run Windows Updates while the guests are running. I'm looking into command-line updates now.
July 2013's host Windows updates may have hosed my running Virtualbox VM's - be careful this week with automatically-running guests on a Windows 7 host.
The story for the non-tldr-deficient readers:
I'm running Virtualbox 4.0.16 on a Windows 7 professional 64-bit host, with several guests: XP, 7, and an SBS2003. The guests all need to be running during the day and I have a script that save-states some guests and shuts others down for backups at night, with a host reboot on Monday nights.
I ran Windows Updates on Monday, July 15, 2013, during the day, expecting the reboot that night to finish the updates. One of the save-state scripts that evening failed with the guest window going dead-fish white and saying Not Responding in the window title bar. Closing the window made a Windows 7 error box "Virtualbox GUI has stopped responding. yadayadayada". I crashed and restarted that guest, reset the backup script and left the host to run the backups next night. The Windows Updates were not finished running, the host still needed a reboot.
Next night I got another guest failing to save-state. I crashed that one and tried again. 3rd night I shut down a guest manually and had the guest window go Not Responding after the shutdown process occured. I killed that guest's window, then noticed all of my other still-running guests, including the SBS2003, had gone dead white Not Responding, even though I hadn't done anything to them. The guests that had remote-log-in capabilities were not accesible, but the Processes were still active in Process Explorer. After killing everything, I rebooted the host. Everything started back up fine, but it was really strange. This had never happened to me before, and may just be a coincidence. Not sure, but better safe than sorry.
Lesson for me: don't run Windows Updates while the guests are running. I'm looking into command-line updates now.