Ran into an interesting problem today while upgrading an existing vSphere 4.1 infrastructure to 5.1 with the latest build (1021289). What we noticed was that when all of the virtual machines that were migrated over to the new 5.1 environment would run a chkdsk every the Windows 2008 R2 operating system was rebooted:
… and whenever we ran a chkntfs c:, the return would be that the disk was dirty. After going through trial and error by moving virtual machines from patched to non-patched ESXi 5.1 hosts without any luck, we opened up a support ticket with VMware and ended up discovering that the issue we had was because the servers had the security update 2823324 patch installed just a week ago. More information on this patch can be found here:
MS13-036: Description of the security update for the Windows file system kernel-mode driver (ntfs.sys): April 9, 2013
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2823324
What we ended up doing was the following:
- Uninstall the security patch
- Reboot
- Let the chkdsk run (the difference we noticed after having the patch uninstalled was that this chkdsk ran much longer as if it did fix something during the process)
- Reboot again
This resolved the issue.