Patchday notes - VM stuck at boot (june 2022)

Today is Microsoft Patchday. Rolling out critical fixes quite fast is always challenging, especially if you learn quickly on multiple machines if there's a specific error.

One thing we're seeing today is that VMs are stuck on booting.

The error is quite simple: VMs are stuck at boot and won't recover itself (at least not seen within several hours).

A simple reboot fixes it

Luckily the solution is even simpler: Reboot the VM and you've a good chance that it's starting right away. We've seen case where multiple reboots have been required, so it even seems like some sort of race condition here that results in a deadlock situation on starting procedure.

We don't know yet if this occurs only directly after applying updates or it will be on every reboot. For now we've not been able to reproduce it.

Affected operating system where we've seen this:

• Windows Server 2016
• Windows Server 2019

There's also now common configuration across the systems as we've seen this on DCs, ADFS nodes, Printservers and Remotedesktopsystems as well as on pure Fileservers. When it comes down, the largest common denominator is the operating system itself :-)

So, plan your updates and be ready to fix stuck systems right away.

If there are any updates on this topic, I'll update this post.