I'm using Workstation Pro 17 for my job on a daily basis. Every once in a while the host machine unceremoniously turns off and restarts (no shutdown, no BSOD). This exclusively happens when working with Workstation Pro. The system runs perfectly stable otherwise. Furthermore, every unexpected power cycle happened during a very specific workload: building a .NET solution using Visual Studio within the VM. This workload utilizes almost all of the VM's CPU resources and reserves a good amount of RAM as well. The crash is obviously associated with a high-load scenario. To clarify: Building does not always crash my host, but every crash occurred during a build.
Prior to updating to Workstation Pro 17.5 my system crashed once every couple of weeks (9 times over the course of 6 months). It was annoying, but workable. The problem has become much more severe after I updated to Workstation Pro 17.5, indicating a potential problem on VMware's side. I just recovered from my third crash since yesterday. This is beyond annoying, it's an outright blocker and led me to finally seek assistance.
Host
OS: Windows 11 Pro (latest updates)
CPU: 7950x (16 cores, 32 threads)
GPU: 7900XTX
RAM: 64GB
VM
OS: Windows 11 Business (latest updates)
CPU: half of the 7950x (16 virtual cores, 16 threads)
GPU: acceleration enabled
RAM: 32GB
Unfortunately, neither the Windows Event Viewer (host & guest) nor the Workstation Pro log files give any indication as to what the problem is. Has anyone had a similar experience? Is there something I could do to further diagnose the problem, e.g. set up more verbose logging?
