The virtual machine freezes during boot up of the Windows Guest OS

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
During boot-up of a Windows Guest OS running in the virtual machine, you experience these symptoms:

• The virtual machine freezes.
• Disk activity seems to hit near 100% after a recent Windows Update.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7

Cause

This issue occurs due to the installation of sedLauncher.exe as part of Windows Update which causes high disk IO operations.

Resolution

This is not a VMware issue.

The sedlauncher.exe file is part of Windows 10 update KB4023057 for Windows 10 which is designed to improve the speed of Windows Update Service components in your machine. For more information, see the Microsoft page on sedlauncher.exe.

To resolve this issue, stop and disable the service (Windows Remediation Service)