Very slow/freezing Workstation Pro (16.2.5) with Ubuntu 22.04 guest: problem identified

[Mbkennel]

I have been experience intermittent extremely slow performance/VM freeze simultaneous with continuous disk access a few minutes after VM startup.  The entire system becomes unresponsive, with most Windows applications freezing (along with the VM guest).  The consequence is often a VM crash with the mksSandbox error, but not always, it may occasionally recover.

The host is a corporate managed Windows 10 machine with adequate hardware resources.  Guest is Ubuntu MATE.

At long last I caught the problem in the act, with Task Manager and Resource monitor simultaneously running prior to this problem occurring.  During the freeze there was a few minutes (5 to 10 at least) of 100 MB/s plus disk access (100% time pegged).

What seems to be happening is that VMWare is writing a large .vmem file but then subsequently "VSSVC.EXE" (according to resource monitor) was writing a presumably very large "Shadow Copy" version thereof. This combination essentially froze the machine because of excess disk load.

I think the solution which VMWare should adopt is to somehow mark the .vmem file as being immune from Shadow Copy use.  There seems to be no obvious user defined way to tag this.

[FredK2]

We're facing similar/same system freeze issues here on multiple systems (VMware Workstation Pro 16.x versions with Windows 10 Enterprise guest). Up to 30 seconds using fast SSD drive (much worse, up to 15 minutes, with slow HDD drive). Sometimes resulting in VM crash. Freezes always happen after VM startup, but also multiple times during the day when the VM is running. We initially blamed SentinelOne software, and suspected it was using up all system resources scanning the very large VMware disk files. But, turned out VMware disk files are on exception list and not scanned by SentinelOne. So, must be a WMware issue, and looks like this correctly identifies the problem.

So, when can we expect a patch for VMware Workstation Pro 16.x fixing this very serious issue?

[Technogeezer]

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@FredK2 wrote:

So, when can we expect a patch for VMware Workstation Pro 16.x fixing this very serious issue?

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Probably never. Workstation Pro 16.x has reached its end of support life on March 31, 2023. VMware typically doesn't patch end-of-support products. You may wish to see if you can reproduce with Workstation 17.

If you want an answer to "when will we see a patch", it's best to open a service request and reproduce on a supported Workstation version. This is a user-to-user forum, not an official VMware technical support forum. Posting here does not guarantee that anyone from VMware will take any action and open a bug report on any issues. You might get lucky and someone might take interest and look at it, but I would not assume that's the case. 

[FredK2]

@Technogeezer Thanks for the reply. At least that explains a few things to me. We've no plan to upgrade to 17. Only upgraded from 15 to 16 last year, not realizing it was nearing end of support. Our mistake I guess. Anyway, not going to pay again for upgrading to a product that will also be end of support in 6 months time.

[RaphaelS23]

I currently have a similar problem on the Workstation Pro 17. The whole thing has suddenly appeared independently of an update. Every time I change an adapter in Devices, the load on the SSD goes to 100%, the VM freezes and is available again after 5-15 minutes.