VMware Workstation Pro 15.5.2 Freezes - Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Host and Any Guest OS

[JeffH322]

Hello,

I recently switched over to using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on my desktop computer. I installed VMware Workstation Pro 15.5.2 and have run into multiple cases where any of the guest VMs I run (Windows 10 or Ubuntu 18.04) cause my entire computer to freeze. The system becomes completely unresponsive and I have to hard reset with the power switch to recover.

I'm only running supported versions of guest operating systems and of course, Ubuntu 18.0.4 is a supported host operating system for VMware Workstation Pro 15.5.2.

Obviously, if I happen to be working on anything that wasn't saved at the time the host freezes up, it's completely lost!

I've tried switching the VM Tools in my Ubuntu 18.04 guest from open-vm-tools to use the official VMware Tools for Linux and the Windows 10 guest is running the most up-to-date version of VMware Tools that comes with VMware Workstation Pro 15.5.2.

I removed VMware Workstation Pro 15.5.2 and installed Oracle VirtualBox 6.1 instead. I don't experience the system freezes so there's definitely something awry with VMware Workstation Pro.

I found a few articles online that recommended a variety of changes including:

1. Forcing VMware to rebuild the kernel modules:
   1. vmware-modconfig --console --install-all
2. Switching from open-vm-tools to VMware Tools (as mentioned earlier)
3. Limiting the amount of physical RAM available to virtual machines (host has 24 GB of RAM - I restricted the total amount available to VMs to 12 GB). I only had one VM running at a time and the maximum amount of memory allocated to any guest is no more than 6 GB for Windows and 3 GB for Linux
4. Disabling khugepaged defragmenting:
   1. echo never | sudo tee /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag

I'm at a loss for what else to try. I rely on VMware Workstation, vCenter, and ESXi for other aspects of my job. Using Linux on my desktop has been an amazing change but not having Workstation is severely hindering my productivity!

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[Vincegre]

I don't know if it can help other people but for me I had the freeze problem only when I started my Win10 VM from VMWare Player. When I start it from Workstation, I had no freeze so far since few days I use Workstation instead of Player program to start it

[JeffH322]

According to the "marketing" details on the VMware Workstation Pro product page (https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-pro.html), under Tech Specs, the text says:

Host Operating Systems (64-bit)

• Ubuntu 15.04 and above
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 & above
• CentOS 7.0 and above
• Oracle Linux 7.0 and above
• openSUSE Leap 42.2 and above
• SUSE Linux 13 and above
• Windows 7 and above
• Windows Server 2008 and above

[scott28tt]

That’s why I posted the KB article for the reference of those following this thread.

[Vincegre]

For info, I have talked with VMWare support and got a long exchange of emails since few days, I have supplied them logs generated by the Logs tool in Workstation Pro Player and they are now investigating on it and told me I should get some news soon hopefully !

Will keep posted here follow-up of it.

Here I have problems only with Windows 10 guest systems, all Unix/Linux guests have no problem at all (I know, Windows is always the problem

[JeffH322]

Vincegre​ thanks for this! Please let us know what you find out.

[JeffH322]

My issue is with VMware Workstation Pro, not with VMware Player. I've never even tried with Player but it sounds like the issue you're experiencing is the opposite of mine if your machine locks up with VMware Player but not with Workstation.

Is this with version 15.5.2? Or another version?

[JeffH322]

Yep - I totally get it. Their marketing is misleading.

[Vincegre]

Investigation still in process with VMWare customer service They asked me additional details about circonstances when it happens !

[Vincegre]

Continuing investigations with VMWare support, I discovered that changing from 4 cores processor to 2 cores for the guest machine got freeze to completely disappear ! My machine is now setup 1 processor 2 cores and no more freeze

[Thorpe2]

Hi everyone

I have seen this problem with VMWare worwstation 15.5.2 trial on my machine with Ubuntu 20.04.  This solutions works for me:

     - run vmware as root

     - go to Edit/Preferences/Memory

     - on additional memory, select fit virtual machine into reserved host RAM

Another method I tried succesfully, was expanding swap space adding a new bigger file (original file had 2Gb size)

I hope this help you

Cheers!

[qhartman]

Have you seen this continue or have other problems? I'm seeing similar behavior, but I see it both in Chrome and FF. The whole VM will hang for a couple minutes, by CPU fan will spin way up, and then when it comes back, one of the tabs in either chrome or FF is dead.

[Thorpe2]

Hi

I only had problems with virtual machines, and I had  same symtoms: VM freezed, CPU fan working at max rpm, etc.  When I ear that computer fun decrease rpm, machine was accesible for few time and the cycle start again.   Some times, for few time, I was able to work with other applications, but at the end, phisical machine was going freezed.  All problems finished when virtual machines was stopped

After change VMWare to use only phisical RAM, or increase swap storage, my computer looks stable and without problems

Cheers.

[Vincegre]

It's getting worse and worse here as Freezes are coming back and now Vmware pushed an update for Workstation that fails to install on my system so now I can't even use anymore Workstation ! Anyone else with same problem of update failing on Ubuntu 18.04 x64 ?

Side note: tech support is not really aware what to do and how to investigate it..... Thinking seriously to ask for full refund and return back at Virtualbox that has always worked well for me unless it's a little less efficient !

[Vincegre]

Giving up here and going back at Virtualbox, bored of VMWare unable to get its software working on an OS released more than two years ago, completely unacceptable ! Asked for full refund for non working software !

Good luck guys on that

[calc76]

I'm still seeing this problem, and it is not tied to any specific hardware, SSD/HDD, different Linux distributions, web browsers, huge pages disabled, etc. And it still happens on Workstation Pro 16.1.1

I have had it happen on multiple different systems over the past several years with nothing common between them except for running Workstation Pro when it happens.

The one consistent symptom is that when it is triggered by Workstation Pro the host's kernel thread [kcompactd0] sits at 100% usage and however many cores are configured for the VM are also sitting at 100% utilization, but inside the VM guest it generally doesn't show much cpu usage. eg top on the host shows ~ 200% cpu usage for vmware-vmx when 2 cores are configured.

The system I'm currently seeing it on has 64GB ram, and when it happens only ~ 20GB is shown as being used via MemTotal - MemAvailable (/proc/meminfo).