VMware Workstation 12.5.2: Virtual Machine freezes

[mechaichezilla]

I'm having constant freezes of my VMs on my laptop:

- Intel Core i7-4720HQ @ 2.6GHz

- 16GB RAM

- System and VMware Workstation on 256GB SSD

- VMs on secondary HDD

- Windows 10 anniversary

The same VMs worked fine on the same laptop (and other machines) before, but I had to send it in to repair (Connector to the HDD was not working properly). The error was fixed and the laptop seems to work fine now, I already checked the HDD and everything seems to work as expected.

Things that have changed are:

- I had to reinstall Windows 10, since the Laptop was set back to Windows 8.1 by service

- I installed the Windows 10 Anniversary Update

- I am using VMware Workstation 12.5.2 now (not sure, where I was before, but probably didn't update to 12.5.x)

The freezes occur randomly and there's no reproducable action that causes it. Might happen, while I work with the VM, but also if I just have it run in background. Once a VM feeezes, the only way to restart it is to reboot the host machine. If I try to restart or power off the VM in VMware, VMware itself becomes unresponsive, often resulting in high disk I/O that doesn't stop (at least not in a reasonable ammount of time).

The VM in question is a Win10-Image that I upgraded to Anniversary as well, but restoring the previous build did not help. Also, I had a feeeze in an Ubuntu Machine as well, so it's most likely not the Virtual Machine itself.

I already tried defragmenting the virtuak disk, changing it from growable to pre-allocated, but so far, nothing helped. I'm also testing the VM on my Mac right now, where it seems to run without issues as well (Fusion 8.5.2)

Are there any known issues with Windows Anniversary and/or VMware 12.5.2?

If not, is there a way to find out, if it's a hidden hardware issue that I wasn't able to figure out yet? As I said, apart from VMware everything seems to work without issues.

Thanks a lot!

[HuanguoZhong]

Welcome to community of Workstation.

Could you help to collect support data from "Help -> Support -> Collect Support Data...' ? We can get more info from it, thanks in advance.

[mechaichezilla]

Thanks for the reply,

but I probably already found the problem: It seems like it was the driver for my onboard graphics card (Intel HD4600) that didn't receive any automatic updates. I discovered this because I just had some black screens in Firefox on my host. That could be solved by deactivating 3D acceleration and seems to be a problem with the drivers. So I thought to try deactivating 3D acceleration in VMware as well and so far the VM works without any problems again. I had it run over night and the host went in sleep mode as well, but the VM still works fine.

I will now try to find out how to manually update the driver since automatic updates and the install software won't work and I'm stuck with the old driver. Once I have the latest drivers installed, I will try turning 3D acceleration on again and see if that helped.

[pmorris]

It might be coincidental but I suffered similar issues with both shared and standalone VMs

I downgraded to 12.5.1 as I assumed this was the issue. No joy.

The only other thing I had done was update my Nvidia driver to the latest. I downgraded to an early October release and the problems ceased. I had heard that the recent nvidia drivers are very buggy...

When I am convinced everything is stable I may try an update back to 12.5.2, however I only upgraded in the first place to see if it would fix the issues I have with shared workstations being X'd out...  which it doesn't

[mechaichezilla]

Good to know, the laptop has a 960M GPU as well, that I didn't consider as a possible error source. But if VMware uses this instead of the Intel onboard chip, that might be an explanation as well.

I'm currently at work, so I can't check it, but it sure is worth a try. I left the VM running at home, so if it's still fine when I get back, I'd say, it's most likely a problem with the 3D acceleration that is turned off at the moment.

I also found a way to upgrade the unwilling HD4600 driver, in case someone is looking for a solution as well:

How-to: bypass "The driver being installed is not validated for this computer" :: Planetary Annihila...

I'll try the VM with the new Intel driver first and see if that helped, otherwise I'll try downgrading the Nvida driver. The last time the VM worked without issues on that host was late September, so the Nvidia driver I was using was older than the one you downgraded to.

[pmorris]

I had no issues last week, I run my shared-vm's 24/7

On the same day, got the update notification from workstation for 12.5.2 and the Nvidia update. These are the only two changes I made on my system and then I started having issues.

I have no run over 24 hrs and it *seems* to be stable (although I am now having issues with a  VM network which is probably related to the downgrade...  :smileyconfused:)

I have seen references to turning off 3d acceleration but I have never had to do this and I would rather not...

[mechaichezilla]

Just a short update:

with 3D acceleration turned off, the VM ran stable for 24+ hours, so the assumption that it was a graphics driver issue seems to be correct.

I have now updated the Intel driver and rebooted the machine with 3D acceleration turned on again, so far it's up for about three hours without any freezes. So hopefully the driver was the cause for the crashes. I will hower let it run for another 24 or so hours, to be sure.

[HuanguoZhong]

Great, thanks for sharing your debug steps

[mechaichezilla · Accepted solution]

Final Update:

The VM is now running for about 24 hours, with 3D acceleration activated. Before that it never worked longer than 2-3 hours. So it's most likely OK now and the old Intel driver was to blame. Or, the old driver in combination with Windows 10 Anniversary, because I didn't have issues with Win8.1 and the originial Win10

In case someone has the same issue, the drivers that currently are installed are:

Nvidia 960M: 375.95 (Didn't change)

2016-11-18

Intel HD4600: 20.19.15.4501 (was an old version from early 2015)

2016-08-11

[Headzman]

**bleep** old thread, but wanted to thank you because I've been having problems for days due to freezes. It even hanged up my ubuntu host until I deactivated virtual memory in the windows guests, but then still the freezes continued on the VMs.

Now it seems to be running fine with 3D acceleration deactivated, will keep it that way until I figure out which drives I've to install on my host.

Again, if you read this thank you, and happy new year!