Transport (VMDB) error - 14 -- Using VMW WS16.1 only on one VM Win7SP1x86

[Bill_Mac]

This only happens when I am trying to create a Win7SP1 x86 VM, the Win7SP1x64 VM I create works fine.

What I believe are the relevant lines from the log:

2021-11-09T11:15:33.049-06:00| vmx| I005: SVGA-GFB: Config settings: autodetect=1, numDisplays=1, maxWidth=2560, maxHeight=1600
2021-11-09T11:15:33.049-06:00| vmx| I005: SVGA-GFB: Desired maximum display topology: wh(6688, 5016)
2021-11-09T11:15:33.049-06:00| vmx| I005: SVGA-GFB: Autodetected target gfbSize = 268435456
2021-11-09T11:15:33.049-06:00| vmx| I005: SVGA-GFB: Using Initial gfbSize = 8388608
2021-11-09T11:15:33.049-06:00| vmx| E001: PANIC: SVGA Framebuffer exceeds memory reservation (size=8388608, reservation=4194304)

Is there a way I can modify the framebuffer size?  I tried modifying svga.vramsize in the vmx file, but that didn't seem to help.

[Bill_Mac]

So, interestingly enough, and I share this here in case others come across this, I changed a few things yesterday and magically my VM started working.  I have not had time to figure out which change actually got me around the problem.  Here are the changes:

Changed ".encoding" in vmx from "UTF-8" to "windows-1252"

I should have mentioned I am using packer and an autounintend.xml file to generate my VMs.  In this particular case I just went and created a VM from ISO manually, and that is why I changed the encoding value.  I can't imagine that was actually the fix, but who knows.

During the config of this VM I add 2 CD-ROM drives to the VM containing Windows updates and VMWare Tools.  Another change I made was to switch those from being IDE drives to SATA drives.  Again, I made that change as I noticed that is what VMWare Workstation 16.1 did when I created the VM manually. 

Finally, I added a vmx configuration change to set "mem.hotadd" to "TRUE".  Again, this is what showed up when I created the VM manually.

I have no idea why any of these changes mattered, or which fixed the issue.  None of these changes would seem to have anything to do with the SVGA buffer, but maybe the hot add did?  I don't really wish to investigate further.  

I did want to provide this, because googling on "Transport (VMDB) error - 14" was essentially a useless waste of a couple of hours.  None of the recommendations around this error pertained to my situation.

Thanks!