Server Keep Crashing on Start Up?

[spik330]

Can someone please tell me why my server keep crashing?
I have about 12 programs installed, all of which are like google chrome and MeGUI. I also have them installed on my home computer with no problems.

When i run the server from a clean install its fast then progressively slows down over the span of a month or two. whenever i restart or turn off the server in that time span and it will crash upon start up. The restart will speed the server up but not back to full speed and then the cycle repeats. However this time the slowing down progressives faster like a few days to a week. Till it reaches the same point of slowness i restarted it for. Then it slows down even more like its back on its original track to slowing down.

There is a 75% chase that is will crash on first try to start up. This means I turn it off or restart, when it boots up it will crash 75% of them time. I have to turn it off and try again this time its a 30% to crash.

Then i format because it so slow it wont even start.

VDS, Two CPU cores, 2048 MB of RAM
Windows server 2012 r2

[kraze]

Windows 2012R2 has a bug in it which causes it to crash upon boot. This is a known issue and we don't recommend clients run it. Generally after 10 or so boots it will properly boot. If you are able to, I'd highly recommend you switch to Windows 2008R2.

[ExCode]

Windows 2012R2 has a bug in it which causes it to crash upon boot. This is a known issue and we don't recommend clients run it. Generally after 10 or so boots it will properly boot. If you are able to, I'd highly recommend you switch to Windows 2008R2.

Sorry to resurrect an old post, but I've been having issues with this since I started using 2012 R2. A couple of months ago I re-imaged my VDS to be 2012 R2 and had nothing but problems going through a series of reboots after doing the various Windows Updates. I couldn't believe that even with a stock install, I could have issues like this. For the most part now, I'm "stable", but only because I don't reboot much. Anytime I do updates or have a need to reboot I worry about it coming back up in a timely fashion. I've even had it successfully boot and crash shortly after a couple times.

In short, I don't trust my VDS to do anything critical/production-based at all. I've considered going back to 2008 R2, but I'm trying to take advantage of improvements in IIS and I'm sure soon enough Microsoft is going to release .NET framework updates that will leave the 2008 servers behind which is a concern for the types of applications I need/will need to run on my server.

So what's the deal with these crashes? I get that there's a bug of some sort, but where's the problem here? It's crazy to me that 2012 R2, a modern OS, has issues being virtualized. Is this a Xen problem? Why isn't this something that's been worked through/resolved at this point?

[ExCode]

Just bumping... I'm hoping someone has some insight into these issues. Thanks.

[Edge100x]

We've investigated extensively at times since this problem started (with some set of Windows patches long ago) and we have never been able to find a workaround, apart from just rebooting again. It seems to be a fundamental Windows issue related to it timing out the disk that only comes up during boot. It happens independent of the Xen version used.

We have attempted to compensate as much as possible on our side by using very fast disks and telling our monitoring system to restart VDSes marked as crashed (Win2k12 crashes/freezes the first time, then goes into a recovery screen the second time).

On your side, I recommend disabling automatic Windows updates and triggering them when you're there to monitor, to help with this.

Also, to be clear to anyone reading this, the crashes only happen at boot-up (sometimes). I haven't seen Windows 2012 R2 crash once it has fully booted -- it's quite stable at that point. This means that it is safe for production use.

I am hoping that they fix this in the next version of their server OS.

[Switcher]

I had a local server running 2012 R2 and loved it, so much that I wanted to update my cluttered VDS from 2008 R2 to 2012 R2. Currently I am in the process of rolling back to 2008 R2. I had problems with restarting get stuck beyond my control and getting stuck "Loading devices" on boot. My first installation resulted in System service running on port 80, messing up my IIS. My page file size was some how set to 200mb giving extreme lag and a whole host of problems. My Interaction Services Detection was not able to display the messages and so on...

As always NFO has been on top of the problems I can't fix. It just seems that 2012 R2 does not like to run on a VDS.

So the conclusion is just stay on 2008 R2 and have no problems.

[Edge100x]

On the pagefile size, it is best to keep that small -- we set it to 200 MB to start with intentionally. Fundamentally, if your pagefile is getting used, you do not have enough RAM. Swapping to disk is an emergency step that the OS takes to try to keep the system running, and it destroys performance, both for you and for other customers on your machine.