Windows does not start in image after going back to older status (either snapshot or backup)

[lberger]

I went back to an image that was last used in February this year, i.e. just 2 month old.

After restoring it from a backup that was done when image was in a suspended mode, it first came up ok.

The first reboot of the image also worked fine, after the reboot it showed a new network and Windows update showed several patches to be installed, but I didn't install them yet. Internet connection from inside image is ok, outside URLs can be accessed (NAT network mode).

Then shutdown the image and startup again: Windows hangs in a black screen with blue Windows logo and rotating dots.

Also going back to snapshots (that all worked ok at the time of their creation) does not work, same issue here: Windows does not come up any longer.

Any ideas how to solve this and what could be the reason for this? Because my company applied updates to my laptop, could that be the reason that VMWare Workstation was maybe updated from 16.0 or 16.1 to 16.2? I installed latest version today (16.2.3), but still same issue.

Environment on host:

VMWare Workstation 16.2.3 (latest)
Running on a laptop with Windows 10 Enterprise 20H2, 64GB ram
Network through a USB adapter to Ethernet as the laptop does not have Ethernet port directly

Environment inside image:

Windows Server 2019

Kind regards, Lorenz

[lberger]

Tried to analyze this some more, but didn't find a solution.

Switched back to using WiFi on the laptop that was used in the past.  I Thought that maybe the switch from WiFi to Ethernet cable over a USB adapter could have caused this. But this did not fix the issue.

At the moment it looks like there's a difference between 'reboot' from inside Windows and 'shutdown' and then a restart. I went back to the status of the backup that had a suspended status. Restoring worked fine, I got back into the running Windows. From there installed MS Updates including VMWare System 9.xx and other MS patches and rebooted successfully several times! Until there were no further MS Updates available. VMWare Tools was also 11.3.5 I think. As soon as one a real shutdown was done, the image could never be started again.

Find attached also the logs from this morning when issue occurred for the first time.

[continuum]

> Because my company applied updates to my laptop, could that be the reason that VMWare Workstation was maybe updated from 16.0 or 16.1 to 16.2?

We are used to assume that VMs will run without problems if the VMware Workstation version changes.
But we  no longer can assume that.
Starting with WS 16 better expect that a minor version updates can break your VMs.
Do not update without watching the forum for a few weeks until you heard how the new version behaves.

Your problem has been reported by so many users before - that you dont need to look any further.
Go back to the version that worked - and stick to it until you hear that VMware is back on track.

Personally I call version 12 as the last known good one.
I would also suggest to switch to a hostOS that is more longterm stable than Windows 10 ...

Ulli

[lberger]

Hi Ulli,

thanks very much for your input.

VMWare version is managed by the IT department of the company I'm working for. It's a huge company and not my decision what is installed. They recently recommended to switch to latest 16.2.2 due to another issue I had (which was not fixed by the switch).

But our IT had another idea: switch the image configuration to only use 1 CPU core (at first). Wow, Windows came up, but was very slow. Now I'm going for 1 processor / 4 cores in the image configuration on a laptop that has 1 processor / 6 cores / 12 threads. No idea why the image worked fine with 6 configured cores before and then not, but at least it starts up now, also in older snapshots.

Best regards, Lorenz

[wila]

Hi,

Your log has this line:

2022-04-25T06:25:41.990Z In(05) vmx Monitor Mode: ULM

This means that Hyper-V is enabled, because if it wasn’t then you would have the line:

 Monitor Mode: CPL0

With Hyper-V enabled VMware is using the Hyper-V API’s from Microsoft and not their own hypervisor.
This has all kinds of implications and stability isn't exactly one of the positive things.
Now you might actually want Hyper-V for corporate reasons, but most often this is unintended.
Note also that Microsoft’s windows feature option “Hyper-V” might actually be unchecked… they are seemingly confusing by intent on this area.

Here’s some notes on disabling from my internal wiki:
In order to turn off Hyper-V mode, run the following command at the host in windows command-line with Administrator privileges:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off

Reboot the system to activate your changes.

If you want to go back to Hyper-V mode again, then you can enable it like this:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto

See also:
Workstation 16 Pro Error "Virtualized Intel VT-x/EPT is not supported on this platform
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2146361

Note that you also might have to disable Memory Integrity.

Windows Security -> Device Security -> Core Isolation details

As long as the log has “monitor mode ULM” like above, it runs under Hyper-V.

--
Wil

[lberger]

Hi Wil,

thanks a lot for checking the logs! That's an interesting observation. Although the VM is now somehow running, I'll keep that in mind and will most probably switch off Hyper-V in the near future, don't really need it.

Best regards, Lorenz