Quick Tip #6: Increasing Start-up Timeout of Services

If you run your lab pretty hot in terms of resource usage, you might find some unusual behaviour when disk read is high, especially when booting up your lab.

I was constantly finding Exchange and PRTG services failing to start when first booting up my lab, with the below error in the Event Viewer for a variety of failed services:

This error occurs when a service doesn’t start within a specified time, default of which is 30 seconds. The service then needs to be manually started. 

To resolve this, you can specify the timeout value in regedit, by creating a DWORD value named ServicesPipeTimeout under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control, with data decimal 60000 (milliseconds, so doubling the timeout to 60 seconds).

This will give your VM a bit more time to bring the service up without permanently putting it into an stopped state.