All,
I am suspecting something wrong with some of my virtual machines. I have been using these VMs for some time, and I'm seeing some odd behavior recently.
I am seeing lots of corruption in the (.vhd based) virtual hard drives. Chkdsk gets automatically run a lot, large files like Oracle datafiles getting corrupted etc... It all seems pretty random and inconsistent, but I've been using .vhd-based virtual machines in VMWare Workstation for years without issue. This issue is new, and the hard drives are basically unstable.
I *think* (and I may be totally off-base) that the issue may be with my new external hard drives. These drives have a 4KB sector size, without e512. Due to this hard drive architecture, Microsoft's tools won't mount or manupulate .vhd files on these drives. The issues seem to go away if I either switch to vmdk, or switch to an 512kb sector size physical hard drive. Since the errors are inconsistent, I don't really have a way to documenting/proving that is the case, but it seems to be.
I am using Workstation 9.0.0 on Windows 7, and the guest is Windows Server 2008R2.
My question is:
1) Does this make any sense?
2) How do I prove/document it, since it's an inconsistent?
3) Is it a known issue?
(Btw, switching to vmdk hard drives isn't an option in our case due to an obscure legal agreement with Microsoft. I have to distribute my VMs in vhd format, even if they are designed to run on VMWare....)
-->Adam