Workstation 16.2.3 - Possible Guest OS Display Freeze (RHEL/Ubuntu) - Windows 10 Host.

[jvp-fema]

Good day to all and thanks for taking a look at my post.

Our software development team is facing what appears to be a VM display freeze.

Dell laptops w/ Windows 10 v10.0.xxx, VMWare Workstaion 16 Pro v16.2.3, VM OS is mainly RHEL 8, but I've installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and experienced the same issue.

One of our developers set up process' running on the VM that could be monitored remotely and sure enough the process' continued after the VM clearly froze...no mouse movement within the guest OS, but could pause and restart to free the display for additional work...until it freezes again.

Unfortunately, we cannot contact VMWare support directly because we are a contracted company by FEMA. We develop and deploy their National Flood Insurance Program software.  All those insurance claims caused by Hurricane Ian...yep, our software processes all the insurance transactions to get payments to folks in a timely fashion - developed on RHEL 8 VM's on Workstation.  We are using US government laptops with valid VMWare Workstation licenses. But FEMA IT does not support VMWare to the depth we need  to the point that some techs don't even know what VMWare is. This is why I'm turning to the VMWare community for a little help.

The usual searches online mention msSandbox and possible VMXNET3 pain points. But the adjustments yield not much. Still many, many freezes throughout the day across the team. Oddly, some team member do not have any problems.  My freezing issues started just a few days ago.  This piece of log is from my vmware.log at time of failure: 

2022-10-12T20:17:48.497Z In(05) vmx GuestInfo: HostinfoDetailedDataHeader version: 1
2022-10-12T20:17:48.497Z No(00) vmx ConfigDB: Setting guestInfo.detailed.data = <not printed>
2022-10-12T20:17:48.506Z No(00) vmx ConfigDB: Setting sata0:1.fileName = "auto detect"
2022-10-12T20:18:48.506Z In(05) vmx GuestRpcSendTimedOut: message to toolbox-dnd timed out.
2022-10-12T20:21:24.770Z In(05) vmx GuestRpcSendTimedOut: message to toolbox timed out.
2022-10-12T20:21:24.770Z In(05) vmx Tools: [AppStatus] Last heartbeat value 235 (last received 6s ago)
2022-10-12T20:21:24.770Z In(05) vmx TOOLS: appName=toolbox, oldStatus=1, status=2, guestInitiated=0.
2022-10-12T20:21:39.647Z In(05) vcpu-0 Tools: Tools heartbeat timeout.
2022-10-12T20:21:39.647Z In(05) vcpu-0 Tools: Running status rpc handler: 1 => 0.
2022-10-12T20:21:39.647Z In(05) vcpu-0 Tools: Changing running status: 1 => 0.
2022-10-12T20:21:39.647Z In(05) vcpu-0 Tools: [RunningStatus] Last heartbeat value 235 (last received 20s ago)
2022-10-12T20:21:44.773Z In(05) vmx GuestRpcSendTimedOut: message to toolbox timed out.
2022-10-12T20:21:44.773Z In(05) vmx GuestRpc: app toolbox's second ping timeout; assuming app is down
2022-10-12T20:21:44.773Z In(05) vmx Tools: [AppStatus] Last heartbeat value 235 (last received 26s ago)
2022-10-12T20:21:44.773Z In(05) vmx TOOLS: appName=toolbox, oldStatus=2, status=0, guestInitiated=0.
2022-10-12T20:21:44.777Z In(05) vmx GuestRpc: Reinitializing Channel 0(toolbox)
2022-10-12T20:21:44.777Z In(05) vmx GuestMsg: Channel 0, Cannot unpost because the previous post is already completed
2022-10-12T20:21:44.777Z In(05) vmx Tools: [AppStatus] Last heartbeat value 235 (last received 26s ago)
2022-10-12T20:21:44.777Z In(05) vmx TOOLS: appName=toolbox, oldStatus=0, status=0, guestInitiated=0.

Any help is truly appreciated,

John

[scott28tt]

As your post needs moving to the Workstation Pro area I have reported it to the moderators.

[jvp-fema]

Thanks Scott....much appreciated!

[jvp-fema]

The team is working out a process to keep workstation stable. Basically...

1. Pause the frozen VM
2. Repair VMWare Workstation
3. Reboot the laptop
4. Workstation may stay stable for the day

[jvp-fema]

The Workstation 16.2.4 installation was pushed to a few of us on Friday and improved the stability of the hosted VM's. 
But one person experienced a display freeze/lockup when his laptop rebooted when the Microsoft October cumulative patch downloaded to his computer.  There is something in the patch that is conflicting with Workstation.  We have no choice to reject MS updates.

[jvp-fema]

The upgrade has not worked for for many of our developers.  Display freezes continue and it's most likely an issue with a Microsoft display adapter change instituted a month or two? ago and released in their updates.  Our best guess taking a look at time frame of updates and issue.

[nicholasdelgado]

Good day,

     I was wondering if there were any updates to this. I'm in a similar boat running Windows 10 (Enterprise Workstation) and various LINUX VMs seem to freeze or hang after about 5 minutes of running. I am attempting to build a CentOS9 Stream VM for my environment to further development with ANSIBLE. I upgraded to vMWare Workstation Pro 17 yesterday in hope that the issue would resolve itself in the upgrade. It did not.

The performance started off good after the upgrade, in fact I was able to build and install a CentOS9 VM completely without any hangs. Prior to, the VM would not fully install due to freezing up, I would have to suspend the VM to "bring it back to life". Today, I set up a timer on the VM and after 4 minutes, the VM would hang. I have attempted RHEL 8 and CentOS7/8/9 with similar results. I used the same media to build a CentOS9 VM on my home laptop using Hyper-V, not a single issue. 

Please advise if there is something that has been released to fix this?

Thanks!

Nick D. 

[mboekhold]

Myself and others have been experiencing the same issue for well over a month now. Seems to be the same as the issue reported in https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Pro/VMWare-Workstation-16-Pro-Ubuntu-22-04-1-VM....