Guest OS-Initiated Shutdown of Virtual Machine Without vCenter Task or Event

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms 

• A virtual machine powered off unexpectedly.
• No vSphere task, event, or external action was recorded in vCenter Server to indicate that the VM was intentionally powered off.
• A virtual machine will not stay powered on. We power it on and it shuts down again. 

Environment

ESXi 7.x, 8.x, 9.x
vCenter Server 7.x, 8.x, 9.x

Cause

The power-off was initiated from within the Guest Operating System, not through vCenter, automation tools, or external user activity.

Evidence from vmware.log confirms the shutdown was triggered internally by the guest OS:

YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.000Z In(05) vcpu-2 - Guest: vsep: AUDIT: VFileSocketMgrCloseSocket : Mux is disconnected
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.000Z In(05) vcpu-3 - E1000: e1000e-- tx queue 1 is enabled.
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.000Z In(05) vcpu-0 - PIIX4: PM Soft Off.  Good-bye.
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.000Z In(05) vcpu-0 - Chipset: The guest has requested that the virtual machine be powered off.
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.000Z No(00) vcpu-0 - ConfigDB: Setting softPowerOff = "TRUE"

This log entry indicates a soft power-off request, typically triggered by a shutdown command within the OS, either manually by a user, by a scheduled task, script, or via a system process.

 

Resolution

Engage the Guest OS vendor or the operating system support team to investigate the cause of the shutdown from within the guest.

Additional Information

Refer for more information

Determining why a VM was powered off / restarted / rebooted

How to determine Virtual Machine Operations looking at the Virtual machine logs