Just trashed one of my servers, what happened??

[Fritz]

MB - Supermicro X9DRD-7LN4F 2 x E5 2670's
Memory - 128GB
Chelsio dual port 10G NIC CC2-N320E-SR (B)
OS - Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter

System has been running stable for months. Tonight I loaded Ubuntu-mate in a VM. I forgot to setup a v-switch before I started so shut down Ubuntu and proceeded to do so. Assigned the second port to the VM and restarted it. Windows spontaneously rebooted and would not start. Went into an endless repair loop. The only way I could get it to start again was to remove the Chelsio NIC. Now I'm back up and running but would like to put the Chelsio back in. Question is, how do I undo whatever I did so I can do so with a repeat of the above scenario. How do I get myself into these quagmires?

OK, went in a deleted the v-switch and was able to put the Chelsio back in. Still don't know what happened but going to try it again using one of the on board NIC's for the VM.

 

[moblaw]

Don't think this relates to your specific problem. I also did a spin-up of a Linux distro recently, but with dynamic memory. I quickly shut it down "or, I thought I did". A few days later, I notice my OS was consuming 96gb og ram (128gb system). Normal usage is 40gb.

Then I looked at the Linux VM in mention, it was never shut down completely, but was stuck/Hanging in systemd shutdown-process, while consuming a vast amount of memory also. So I imagine, if I had less than 96gb memory, it would probably also had reset the host.