Remote Assistance Causes Unexpected Reboot of Target Machine

[rdwing3000]

So here's the issue,

We use Windows Remote Assistance for remote controlling employee's computers when troubleshooting issues.

Almost all of our employees use virtual desktops through VMware, running Windows 7 32bit with some machines running 64bit.

Remote Assistance is enabled on all of our machines.

Some of our technicians are experiencing a weird problem. Sometimes, seemingly randomly, when they send an employee a Windows Remote Assistance request and the user tries to accept the request, the end-user's machine will suddenly shutdown and reboot. This of course delays our technician from being able to troubleshoot the issue and can sometimes lead to lost work for the end-user.

I've done some Google searching as well as searching within this forum but so far I haven't come across anyone else who's ran into this issue before. I've never seen it happen before and we aren't finding anything terribly significant in Windows logs so far.

So I am looking to see if anyone in the community has ran into this issue before and could possibly shed some light on what might be going on.

This problem doesn't happen all the time, and certainly is not following any discernible pattern. This makes it incredibly difficult to troubleshoot or otherwise look into.

 

[SgtScream]

Do the windows event logs show who initiated the shutdown?

 

[rdwing3000]

Not that I can see...unless I'm just totally blind. Is there a specific location in the event log where that information would be shown? The logs that we're getting are crash dumps and kernel processor entries stating that the system rebooted without cleanly shutting down first.

 

[SgtScream]

So it's not a "graceful shutdown", it's an unexpected shutdown. This doesn't appear to be software related. You stated this is happening on multiple computers? Are they all the same make and model?

 

[rdwing3000]

Correct, this is an unexpected shutdown. Our techs will send the remote control request via Windows Remote Assistance and then the target machine will just reboot. This is happening on virtual desktops using VMware. All the VMs have the same specs.

 

[SgtScream]

And its just the vm that restarts and not the host, correct? Are all of these vms on one host, or does each user run a vm on their desktop?

 

[rdwing3000]

Yes, just the VMs are rebooting. The host is not. We run multiple hosts which are load balanced.

 

[SgtScream]

Have you tried opening a case with VMware?

 

[rdwing3000]

No not yet. We were hoping to gain some sort of traction before going that far.

 

[rdwing3000]

Any one else with some insight into this weird issue?

 

[SgtScream]

What version of esxi are your running?

 

[rdwing3000]

We're running 5.5