vmware workstation 7 guests stops responding/hangs, cannot be suspended or powered off

[bernard10]

Hi,

I have the following problem. Sometimes in vmware workstation 7.1 my 2 guest operating systems hangs/stop responding. The "Power off" and "suspend" buttons are grayed out and hence the guests cannot be suspended nor powered off. If I try to close the VMware Workstation application itself (the ordinary way in Windows, pressing the cross in the upper right corner) it won't let me close it. Instead I get a pop-up saying: "<name-of-guest> is still busy. Please wait until the operation is complete before closing.". But no matter how long I wait nothing happens and at last I have to restart my host, of course in turn forcing VMware and the guest to close down (in an ugly way...). After restart of the host, I can then restart the 2 guests, which were powered down, but after some time, hours or days, the same thing happens again.

Host OS: Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, 8Gb memory

Guest 1: Windows Home Server (Windows Server 2003) 32 bit. 1024 Mb allocated memory

Guest 2: Ubuntu 9.10 LAMP server. 1024 Mb allocated memory

Any suggestions/solutions? Thanks!

[admin]

The "Power off" and "suspend" buttons are grayed out and hence the guests cannot be suspended nor powered off. If I try to close the VMware Workstation application itself (the ordinary way in Windows, pressing the cross in the upper right corner) it won't let me close it. Instead I get a pop-up saying: "<name-of-guest> is still busy. Please wait until the operation is complete before closing."

That would happen only in response to you doing something (performing a power operation, performing a snapshot operation, shrinking or defragmenting virtual disks, etc.). It wouldn't happen if you're casually interacting with the guest.

Were you doing anything at the time?

The next time this happens, would you mind attaching your UI and VMX log files? The location of the UI log is located in the Help > About dialog, and the VMX log file is the vmware.log file in the VM's directory.

[bernard10]

Well I used the host for webbrowsing, some development i.e. ordinary use of the host OS. Didn't do anything with the guests but of course Windows Home Server (one of the guests) can have done things (balancing for instance) and the other guest (Ubuntu LAMP) is a webserver that people access so they are not idling of course. I know that you get the same pop-up message while, for instance, powering down or suspend a VM and trying to shut down VMware Workstation at the same time, but as I said, when this problem occurs the VMs hangs "forever" and that without me interacting with VMware, except for "starting" VMware Workstation after it has been running with the guests in the background.

Will post logs if it happens again.