Windows Host & Guest > Apps start after reboot only

[Pummelchen]

Hello,

I use Win Srv 2019 as the host and multiple VMs of Win Srv 2019. All VM's have 2 TB SSD type disk. I noticed that after installation of a larger app like Visual Studio 2017, that it wont launch. No error are shown, just nothing happens. Once I restart the VM, I can start the program just fine. I saw this behaviour on all VM's which have mostly an identical configuration. It seems that some data needs to be flushed to disk first during reboot before that data can be used for action which is odd. Is that a common behaviour of VirtualBox ? With Hyper-V I did not see such issues.

[socratis]

We need to see a complete VBox.log, from a complete VM run, where the problem occurs:

• Start the VM from cold-boot (not from a paused or saved state) / Observe problem / Shutdown the VM (force close it if you have to).
• With the VM completely shut down (not paused or saved), right-click on the VM in the VirtualBox Manager and select "Show Log".
• Save only the first "VBox.log", ZIP it and attach it to your response. See the "Upload attachment" tab below the reply form.

All VM's have 2 TB SSD type disk

How much does your host have? How much is free? Why that much?

[Pummelchen]

Hello socratis,

please find the log attached. I dont know how to replicate the issue as it happens only after installation of larger applications.

If it helps, I have non-working Clipboard sharing, too, among all VMs.
Bi-Directional Clipboard is configured, Guest software is installed on all VM's, but I cannot not copy text data from the host Notepad to the client Notepad, nor the other way around. That issue is in all 8 VM's.

How much does your host have?

The host has 515GB as Windows C: drive and 1TB as D: drive which contains only Dropbox which contains all VirtualBox files.

How much is free?

The C: drive has approx 230GB free and the D: drive 170GB free.

Why that much?

2 TB is not much. This specific VM runs as a internal customer support ticket system (TruDesk) and will over time handle ten thousands of tickets and attachments. To expand drives once they are getting full is a mess with Windows, so the idea is to start with a big drive from the start.

The key point is that after a VM reboot everything works fine. Just during installation of large software package, the data seems to be in "hyperspace", Windows cannot start large apps cos the application was installed but cannot be read as it does not exist yet.

Easy way to replicate is to use a clean Windows VM and install Visual Studio 2017. It will install fine, but you cant start it. The VS2017 logo will start to show, then disappear without any error message. On next reboot everything works fine. That doesnt not happen on bare metal machines.

[socratis]

How much does your host have?

The host has 515GB as Windows C: drive and 1TB as D: drive ... The C: drive has approx 230GB free and the D: drive 170GB free.

2 TB is not much.

Yes it absolutely is!!! If your host has 230 GB free max on any drive, how in the seven kingdoms are you going to allocate 2 TB on a VM? Where is that hard drive going to come from? Hyperspace? A wormhole?

You got to do some math, in the real space not the imaginary. You assign real resources from your host to a VM. You can't assign 128 CPUs to your VM, when you're on a Core2 Duo. Neither can you assign 512 GB of RAM to your VM, when you only have 4 GB on your host. And in your case, you can't assign 2 TB of hard drive to your VM, when the largest you have available is 230 GB if you store your VDI on the C:\ drive, or worse 170 GB if you store your VDI on the D:\ drive.

Do the math and adjust your VM to the reality of your host...