Windows 11 VM freezing when Mac resumes from sleep

[mcreilly]

Trying to find a solution to this persistent problem on my partner's machine. He's using an iMac which was top spec (8 core Intel i9 with 64Gb RAM and 1Tb SSD) a couple of years ago. Mac OS fully up to date. Running VMware Fusion Player 13.0.1, with a single Windows 11 VM, also right up to date with patches and updates.

When the iMac wakes from sleep in the morning, the Windows VM appears to be hung. You can move the cursor around the screen, but that's it. If you wait patiently for about twenty minutes it springs back into life as if nothing had happened. The clock in the bottom corner of the screen will show the time the iMac went to sleep the night before until it un-freezes itself. This has gone on for some months. On the Mac side of things, everything seems to wake immediately and work fine. Nothing interesting reported at all in the Windows event log.

I discovered this week that if you wake the iMac and the Win11 machine is frozen, by going to the VM library and doing a "suspend" then immediately a "resume" you can "un-freeze" the Win11 machine. Quicker than waiting 20 odd minutes, but still far from ideal.

My guess is this might be to do with power saving settings or "pass through" of power state, but nothing I've tried tweaking changes the behaviour.

My own iMac (identical hardware, also up to date with patches, with Fusion Pro and a number of VMs including Win10 and Ubuntu) doesn't do anything like this.

Sound familiar to anybody? Any helpful suggestions?

[ColoradoMarmot]

Short answer, don't do this.  While in theory Fusion will auto-sleep when the machine does, it's hit or miss.  Best option is to always suspend the guest manually before sleeping the machine.

FWIW, Apple has gotten overly aggressive with sleeping.  Just set the screen to blank, and 'prevent sleep when screen blanks', and a sleep time of 0.

[jvdstoel]

I have exactly the same problem. Could it be the problem is relation to Fusion?

[ColoradoMarmot]

The issue is that you can get into a race condition between fusion, the guest OS and the host OS when the host tries to sleep a running guest.  It sometimes works, but when it doesn't, you can end up with a variety of symptoms, including this one.

The workaround is to prevent your machine from sleeping, or to manually suspend the guest (and letting it finish dumping memory to disk) before sleeping the host.

As I mentioned, there's little reason to auto-sleep a computer these days.  Letting the screen turn off reduces the power consumption to a trickle.  If you're actually moving it, just suspend the guest before closing the lid.

[ct187]

This happens consistently with my Win11 VM. The Mac host will sleep when I walk away for too long and when I get back the Windows guest will be unresponsive. BUT, I have found that if I suspend the VM and wake it back up, it comes back like nothing happened.