What do the values mean on Kernel-Power shutdown events?

Question

I'm trying to troubleshoot an issue that's cropped up with some of our VM guest servers recently. They've been scheduled for years to reboot automatically overnight, which has been entirely trouble-free until our hosting service changed VM infrastructure last fall. Now, the same scheduled task (using the standard Windows shutdown command with the /R and /F options) works fine ~95% of the time, but every so often a server will fail to come back up from the reboot, staying off until forcibly cycle from the VM host end. Obviously, this is a problem.

Looking at Event Viewer on one of the affected guest systems, I note that it first logs event 1074 (process has initiated a restart) at the scheduled time, as expected with our configuration. However, half a minute later, it logs event 109 (kernel power manager has initiated a shutdown transition,) with ShutdownActionType 5, ShutdownEventCode 0, and ShutdownReason 5.

I suspect that this is the culprit, but while I can find plenty of questions from people with similar problems over the years, I can't for the life of me find any reference on what those values mean. Where can this information be found? Does this have any relation to the table of "reasons" listed when one runs shutdown /? on the guest server?

(Our hosting service is trying to point fingers; I just want to get this fixed. Any indications as to where I can get a straight answer would be greatly appreciated.)

Answer 1

Hello,

Thank you for posting in Microsoft Q&A.

Based on the description, I understand your question is related to kernel shutdown.

This event indicates that the kernel power manager has initiated a shutdown transition.

Check that there are no pending updates that might be causing the shutdown to hang.

Review the logs on the VM host to see if there are any indications of issues at the host level that might be affecting the guest VMs.

Try using different methods to initiate the shutdown (e.g., using PowerShell or a different shutdown command) to see if the issue persists.

Have a nice day.

Best Regards,

Molly

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