failed to initialize

I ran into an issue that took me quite a bit of time to resolve that I wanted to share with everyone.  I had a customer that I worked with that was not able to start any VM (virtual machine)  across 3 Hyper-V servers he had deployed in his environment.  When attempting to start the virtual machine it would get to starting…4% and then give a pop-up error message “<VM Name> failed to initialize”.  My first stop was the Hyper-V VMMS log which contained the same error.  I eventually checked the application log and found this event:

Event ID 1000, Application Crash
Faulting application name: vmwp.exe, version: 6.3.9600.18895, time stamp: 0x5a4b1c19
Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 6.3.9600.18895, time stamp: 0x5a4b1cf7
Exception code: 0xe06d7363
…
Faulting application path: C:\Windows\System32\vmwp.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\system32\KERNELBASE.dll
…

This led me to a topic referring to an issue with January 2018 windows updates.  You can find that article here.  I uninstalled all updates in January and February on the first server, but this made no difference.  The solution was to change 2 registry keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\FeatureSettingsOverride
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Virtualization\MinVmVersionForCpuBasedMitigations

Before running the below commands, the values were 3 and 1 respectively.

reg add “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management” /v FeatureSettingsOverride /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
reg add “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Virtualization” /v MinVmVersionForCpuBasedMitigations /t REG_SZ /d “1.0” /f

I hope you have found this article informative.  If you have anything to add or just want to comment, please do so below.