VMware Communities
zebj
Contributor
Contributor
Jump to solution

VM takes a very long time to shut down if left on for a long time

I am using:

VMWare Workstation Player 14.1.7 build-12989993

Host OS: Windows 10 x64 (1809 - 17763.503)

Guest OS: Linux (either 14.04 or 16.04)

If I leave a Linux Virtual Machine running for a long time (at least 8 hours, but the problem happens more often if the VM has been running for at least 16 hours), when I go to shut down the virtual machine, it will get to a gray screen and sit there for a very long time before finally closing.  Sometimes it takes 5 minutes to close and sometimes much longer like 45 minutes.  Anytime I have left it this way overnight, it is always closed by the morning.  I have never seen this problem if the VM has been running for less than about 4 hours.

Once the problem occurs, clicking on the VM window will pop up a message box that says:

VMWare Player is not responding

If you close the program, you might lose information

-> Close the program

-> Wait for the program to respond

The VM was in full screen and I still see the thin VMWare drop-down bar at the top that I always have set to slide up.  It will not pop down when I hover the mouse over it.  When the mouse is anywhere over the gray screen, I see the blue Windows spinner wait mouse icon.

Windows task manager (host OS) shows very little CPU or disk activity.

There are four developers here where I work, and they all report the same thing on their machines and VMs.

Our use case of these Linux VMs is to build AOSP Android OS images.  They are configured with 4 to 16 cores and at least 16 GB of RAM.

Thanks for any help.  My goal with reporting this is to make sure VMWare is aware of this issue and can hopefully fix it in a future release.

-Zeb

Reply
0 Kudos
1 Solution

Accepted Solutions
zebj
Contributor
Contributor
Jump to solution

I upgraded to version 15.1.0 and the problem is resolved.

View solution in original post

Reply
0 Kudos
3 Replies
continuum
Immortal
Immortal
Jump to solution

> Sometimes it takes 5 minutes to close
Thats not bad at all ...
The time required to shut down depends on the amount of RAM you assigned , the size of the virtual disks and the number of snapshots.
16 GB RAM is probably way more than you actually need - keep in mind that assigning too much RAM is contraproductive and will also have a bad influence on overall performance.


________________________________________________
Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...

Reply
0 Kudos
zebj
Contributor
Contributor
Jump to solution

A typical shutdown of a linux VM on my machine takes about 9 seconds.  5 minutes is when I see the problem but it manages to resolve itself quickly.  If I leave the VM running overnight, it will always take much longer to shutdown (i.e. 45 minutes).  Also, during this shutdown time with the gray screen, I think the VM has done its thing and it is VMWare Workstation that is hung trying to close.  I don't know for sure if this is the case though.  Is there any way to get any debugging from Workstation?

AOSP builds require a minimum of 16 GB of RAM (see here: Requirements  |  Android Open Source Project ).  I have hit out-of-memory errors when trying to build Nougat with only 14 GB of RAM.  Also, in my experience, if the swap size is also less than 16 GB, it will cause issues as well.

Reply
0 Kudos
zebj
Contributor
Contributor
Jump to solution

I upgraded to version 15.1.0 and the problem is resolved.

Reply
0 Kudos