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VM failed to start – Unable to allocate Ram: insufficient system resources – Error 0x800705AA

My Hyper-V virtual machines are working well until yesterday. I had a problem with starting Hyper-V virtual machines in my lab environment. I tried to start one of my few VM’s and I got the following error:

MachineName failed to start
Unable to allocate 4 GB of Ram: insufficient system resources exist to complete the request service (0x800705AA)

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I spent few hours try to resolve this issue.

  • Disabled all software running on the server (this software was running before)
  • Uninstall all software I can.
  • Check online for similar issues.
  • Modified the cached physical memory reservation (using the registry key), to increase free physical memory.
  • Change memory assignment on VM to dynamic.
  • Applied few hotfixes (KB983289 and KB979149)
  • Check the event viewer for more info
  • Verify I have enough space on all disk partitions
  • Delete all snapshots
  • Export and Import VM
  • Create new VM etc…

As you can see below there are plenty of memory available on my laptop.

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Where is the catch?

It’s a Google background program called GooglecrashHandler.exe. If you have that active on your system, that’s what is doing it and you should disable it.
This is a pretty new problem that just started showing up recently.

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As described here – http://www.ghacks.net/2011/05/16/googlecrashhandler-exe-process-update/, the 2 GoogleCrashHandler.exe processes run because you have accepted the Google’s default setting to „Automatically send usage statistics and crash reports to Google“ in some of your installed Google aps. In Chrome, for example, this option can be turned off in Options–>Under The Hood.

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Additional notice:

If you access your Hyper-V Server using RDP and you never logout of your RDP session to the Hyper-V Server management OS over the time your user session will continue to consume more and more RAM. The way to prevent this is to logout of your remote session (and make a practice of it) instead of always disconnecting. This would also clean up background processes such as this google thing.

Many thanks to Bob Comer, Brian Ehlert and my colleague Ana Roje Ivančić.

I hope that can help you to resolve the same issue with your virtual machines.

That’s it for today. Enjoy Winking smile

Romeo Mlinar
February 17, 2012
Administration, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Recovery, Virtualization, Windows Server
5 comments

Windows service does not want to start under a domain user account

For many reasons we must run some Windows services under a specific user account. Because of that we sometimes have a problem with starting those services when we reboot the server. Service does not want to start regardless of the Automatic startup type. Why? In this post I would like to explain how to resolve that issue.

For example:

In my environment I have one service account (mydomain\TfsTestLabManagement) for few services on Team Foundation Server. One of those services is Visual Studio Test Controller service which is running under mydomain\TfsTestLabManagement  domain account and is set to Automatic start.
I added that account in the Log on as a service under  Default Domain Policy. When I reboot the TFS server service does not want to start. Because of that I need to start service manually and every time I need to enter password and click Start.

Wrong configuration:

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When you put Automatic start under Startup Type the service does not want to start and you need manually start the service.

What you need to do.

Step 1.

Add service account in the Log on as a service in Default Domain Policy.

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Step 2.

On the server under the Services in the Log On tab add service account.

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Step 3. the last and the most important step! Under the General tab Startup Type: choose Automatic (Delayed Start) like in picture below.

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Next time when you reboot the server, service will start automatically. The catch was only in Automatic (Delayed Start) Startup Type.

That’s it for today.

Romeo Mlinar
February 13, 2012
Administration, Microsoft, Recovery, Windows Server
0 comments

Clone Virtual Machine with Virtual Machine Manager

Today I had to Clone a virtual machine in my production environment and I would like to explain how it works. This is a simple procedure with few steps and the whole procedure will be explained as always with many pictures. Before the cloning of virtual machine image you have to prepare the System for Cloning.

As you probably know by now, Microsoft-based operating systems use SIDs (Security IDs) that are generated as part of the initial setup of Windows. If you have more than one computer with the same SID, this could cause problems, and cloning a computer (either physical or virtual) without re-generating this SID can cause SID duplication.

How to prepare the system for cloning I will write in another post.

Step 1.

You must first shutdown virtual machine which you want to Clone. When your VM is turned off, right click on VM and choose Clone.

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At the second step choose new name for your new virtual machine.

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On the Configure Hardware field if you need the same hardware configuration like previous VM leave hardware configuration by default or edit what you need.

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At the next step you need to choose where you want to deploy the virtual machine. I chose “Place the virtual machine on a host”

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At the next screen I chose host on which was located the previous virtual machine.

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Select virtual machine path…

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Specify virtual network…

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At the end review the virtual machine settings. If you want to start cloned virtual machine immediately check mark “Start the virtual machine after deploying it on the host”  and click Create.

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The process started.

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When the process is finished we have two of the same virtual machines whit the same settings.

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Before you turn on both virtual machines you need to rename the new one. How to do that, especially if your vm’s are in the domain,  I‘ll describe this in my next post.

Until then have a nice week!

Romeo Mlinar
February 7, 2012
Administration, Hyper-V, Microsoft, SCVMM, System Center, Virtualization
3 comments