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WhiteKnight
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Workstation 12 Pro crashes whenever I try to install MS Visual Studio 2015 in VM

I'm owning Workstation 12 Pro for about half a year now. Since then it hasn't once been able to run my development environment in a VM flawlessly.

Whenever I install Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 in a Windows 10/64 VM, the Workstation graphics driver crashes and the VM then hangs - and incidentally my host's graphics driver crashes, too. Only a reboot can then regain me access to my host machine.

I'm running Workstation on three different hosts, so it surely is a Workstation error.

Moreover, playing audio in the guest is making the guest significantly lag, too.

By now I have already wasted three support tickets on these problems. They only get temporarily solved and then re-occur with the next update to Windows 10 or Visual Studio 2015.

VMware is showing a strong degradation in product quality. Apparently, VMware does not have the resources to create a good product anymore.

In Germany we call such enduring lack of quality an "Armutszeugnis". The dictionary calls it an evidence of incapacity.

My next host installation will use Hyper-V. I'm through with Workstation now. Waiting for half a year to get critical problems fixed is not what I'm paying for.



[VMware]: Workstation 17 Pro; --
[host]: Windows 10x64 host; --
[guests]: Windows 10x64, Windows 8x64.
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bonnie201110141
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Can you try if below solutions can fix your issue?

Solution 1: Update your host sound driver

Solution 2: If solution 1 does not work, will this work for you? LCS - VMAudioFixTray

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WhiteKnight
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Thanks for trying to help!

Regarding (1): I'm running the latest audio drivers available for the ASUS X99-E WS mainboard.

Regarding (2): Audio works perfectly fine with every guest OS I'm running, even Wavelab 5 (a professional audio editing software) on Windows XP. Only with Windows 10/64 guest I'm now experiencing this trouble.



[VMware]: Workstation 17 Pro; --
[host]: Windows 10x64 host; --
[guests]: Windows 10x64, Windows 8x64.
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WhiteKnight
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Just to recap on this issue:

It still occurs. I cannot install any current Microsoft developer product (SSMS, Visual Studio 2017, Docker for Windows etc.) in a Windows 10x64 VM. The VM crashes all the time I do this any any host machine I'm running the VM.

According to VM support this is an issue of the Nvidia graphics driver. My machines are all equipped with a top-notch Nvidia graphics card each.

Nvidia cannot seem to reproduce the issue. So I'm looking for someone facing the same issue to share his experience with me and Nvidia.

Is anyone facing the same issue?



[VMware]: Workstation 17 Pro; --
[host]: Windows 10x64 host; --
[guests]: Windows 10x64, Windows 8x64.
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bluefirestorm
Champion
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I see that it has been well around 18 months since your first post on this thread.

I don't know what you have or have not tried. But from what I see you'd want to keep the 3D acceleration ON in the VM settings.

What you could try is to switch the VM to use OpenGL instead of DX11 for the render engine of the VM by adding/editing the following lines in the vmx configuration file. Because the default behaviour is with 3D acceleration ON, the VM will use DX11 of the Windows host to be render engine.

mks.enableDX11Renderer = "FALSE"

mks.enableGLRenderer = "TRUE"

mks.enableD3DRenderer = "FALSE"

This has fixed an issue with Chrome tabs not being rendered properly on a W10 VM as well as crashing of some OpenGL application from postings into this forum.

Switching to OpenGL seems to give better graphics capabilities to the guest VM as well as seen from the vmware.log. On a laptop with GTX 960M, hardware compatibility 12, 3D on, the VM sees supersampling/AA capabilities and the Chrome browser inside the VM (you can check chrome://gpu) also sees 16x MSAA capability (versus none if using DX11).

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WhiteKnight
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Together with VMware staff (gee, they have been such a great help in hunting down this issue) we finally found the reason for the bug in NVIDIA's 3D Vision DirectX drivers.

The error occurs when you have enabled 3D Vision in your NVIDIA driver's Control Panel settings:

NVIDIA Control Panel.png

NVIDIA is now trying to fix this for the last couple of months ... and ongoing ...

Thanks, bluefirestorm​, for your hint! Now after having found the reason for this issue (I'm actually using 3D Vision in my host machine) and being able to eliminate the root of this erroneous behaviour in the future I can now try your alternative DirectX settings for my guests as a workaround.



[VMware]: Workstation 17 Pro; --
[host]: Windows 10x64 host; --
[guests]: Windows 10x64, Windows 8x64.
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