Had an issue with several virtual machines not starting this week, they just got stuck on 10% and no matter how many times I restarted the VM and the Host they wouldn’t start running. This could have been a disaster if it happened on a live system but luckily it wasn’t.
Let’s take a look at how to fix it.
First turn of the VM’s that are experiencing the problem. If they wont turn off then you will need to kill off the Virtual Machine Worker Process as seen below. But wait there is one for every VM running you can either kill them all off or more likely you will want to identify the exact process for the VM and kill that.
Step 1: Locate the Process hosting the VM
To identify the process download Sysinternals Process explorer to the Host and run is as Admin.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processexplorer.aspx
Next open up the settings to the VM experiencing the problem and copy out the location of its primary hard drive. You will need to paste that into Process explorer next.
Now in Process explorer click on the search button indicated in the screen shot below and paste in the location of the hard drive and click on search.
The search will locate the processes managing the VHDX files. You will want to double click on the vmwp.exe process and it will highlight which one relates to the VM you are having trouble with. On the left of the screenshot below we can see the vmwp.exe (Virtual Machine Worker Process) has been highlighted in grey so simply right click it and end the process. Doing this will stop your VM from trying to start so you can make the changes required to fix the problem.
Step 2: Find the cause
To diagnose the problem open up the settings for the VM experiencing the problem and look over all of the settings. The cause of this is most likely an error or corruption in the configuration somewhere. In the screen shot below we can see the network settings were no longer valid. Something has either changed in our network configuration or it became corrupt, either way we can update the config and apply the settings.
Once the settings have been applied you can start the VM and hopefully it will start up fine.
Hope this was useful to you!
