I installed ESXi 4.0 on an HP Proliant g5 with a 64bit Xeon processor and took advantage of the free license as I work for a public school. I created two instances of server 2003 from scratch, one to be the DC, DHCP, the other to be a file server and DNS/DHCP backup. I had both guests up and running fine, setup my user accounts, transferred the data, etc etc.

Once I joined a client machine to the domain, I would find that both of my Windows guests would lock up. Sometimes it would be for five or so minutes, once it was overnight. The "locked up" state means that as far I could tell, all services were stopped; dhcp no longer handed out IP's, DNS stopped working, I couldn't RDP into the server. The ESXi host, my HP server, was still running fine. VSphere was working, and I could look at the performance of the individual guests.

I would try Powering off the hosts from inside VSPhere, and the hosts would start powering off, but get stuck at 95%, and stay that way, sometimes only for 10 minutes, others for hours. Several times I had to restart ESXi from it's console in order to restart my machines.

Now, can anyone tell me what is happening, and how I can fix it, or take steps to prevent it? I hired a consultant to come take a look at it, someone who's experience and knowledge I trust, and he told me he had never seen anything like this ever before. He spoke to a friend of his who is VM certified, and he also said he had never heard of this issue. Thanks for your replies, and I'll do my best to respond ASAP. Currently, the server is powered off, and I've reinstituted my nine year old Server 2000 boxes, and I'm considering installing ESXi 3.5. Does anyone know a host created in 4.0 will work in 3.5? I'd really like to avoid having to rebuild those accounts! I know 4.0 works on this server, as I have another server in another school with the same exact hardware running 4.0 fine.

• Brendan