I have a VMWare server running on Windows 2003 with a Windows 2003 guest. The host machine uses SAS RAID5 storage.
When the guest operating system is backing up, or does other disk-intensive things, I often get this event log message: "The device, \Device\Scsi\symmpi1, did not respond within the timeout period." It has happened that the guest has blue-screened, probably from this problem.
There is nothing in the host's event log.
The only answers I have been able to find were about slow SAN access. They point to the VMWare KB article called "Windows Virtual Machine Blue Screens When I Use SAN LUNs" (Linkification: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1014). But there is no SAN involved here, and the article is also about ESX server, not regular VMWare Server.
What can I do to solve the disk timeouts?