All virtual machines keep freezing up every now and then

[twoez]

Hello everyone,

Since I've reinstalled my server and upgraded to Workstation 11 I've been getting temporarily freezes of all vmware machines every now and then.

After the short freezes I get the message in the logs for every machine saying the following:

2015-05-17T15:41:08.822+02:00| vcpu-0| I120: sata0:1: Command *UNKNOWN (0x4a)* took 179.997 seconds (ok)

I am now verifying and repairing my sata raid 10 as that's where all the vmachines are running on.

Can anyone else help me figuring out what this problem could be? I've never had this problem with workstation 10.

Best regards,

Roy

[twoez]

Alright I've verified all the data on the raid 10 diskdrive, all errors got repaired, but I still get these timeouts on all of the vmachines.

What could possible be wrong here? During the freeze I am still be able to open and browse the raid drive.

How to find out which drive sata0 exactly is? Maybe I am looking at the wrong drive...

And are there any other tricks or tips I could try to figure out what is causing this problem?

[tahoekid77]

Curious, I logged in here to report the same issue. I'm doing development on Linux guests using a Windows 7 host with Intel i7 8 core processor, 8GB of memory.

This was occuring on VMWare Workstation 10, and I recently installed an eval of Workstation 11, and both have the same problem.

I have tried disabling anti-virus, disabling hyper threading at the BIOS level, nothing seems to fix the problem.

Windows Event Viewer reports AppHangTransient at the same time.

When actively editing or running programs on my Ubuntu guests, they all freeze every 5 minutes or so, up to a full minute. Mouse moves, but no reaction, keyboard input does nothing.

Makes writing code difficult as I have to wait it out. I'm running dual monitors and Windows itself seems to run fine (I can pull up menus, etc for Windows apps)

Hardware is Windows 7 64 bit, Intel i7-4820K CPU @3.70GHZ 8GB RAM

I removed devices from the VM that do not exist, or are not needed. Sound, Floppy, extra DVD, printer.

I have other machines which work fine, just this specific host with 8 physical cores which may or may not be related to the problem.

[tahoekid77]

I installed the same VMs into VirtualBox on the same machine, no problems.

I will likely use VB going forward.

[twoez]

I actually fixed the problem. The freezes came from a dying drive in the RAID 10 configuration. I ran CrystalDiskInfo which gave me an error that one of the drives was unrecoverable and slowly dieing. Although the raid did still work, it caused the freezes every now and then.

[tahoekid77]

Good to hear you solved that... however my situation was not that. I am migrating all of my VMs into VirtualBox which works.

[fa2lerror]

Try disabling 3d acceleration. that solved my sporadic vcpu crashes over the last few weeks since 10.0.6 upgrade.