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MikeSzanto
Contributor
Contributor

virtual machine does not resume when desktop is resumed

Hi folks,

I'm hoping someone can provide some tips to help with the following issue...

My desktop and virtual machines are setup to go to sleep after 2 hours of inactivity.

Sometimes after waking the desktop, I cannot get my suspended VM to awaken, and it becomes inaccessible. When this happens, I cannot close the VM's tab and cannot shut down VMware Workstation because it thinks the VM "is still busy", and all items in the VM's Power Options menu are grayed out.

To recover from this, I kill the workstation using task manager and then have to jump thru hoops in order to get workstation running again (if i don't reboot) after which I have to remove the lock files on the VM. This is very undesirable because I leave a lot of docs, spreadsheets, visual studio, etc. open so that I can resume my work from the previous day. Shutting down the VM and the desktop is not desirable.

First off, what is the proper procedure to recover from this situation? I've read that deleting the .vmem and .vmss files works, but I will lose any unsaved work and will have to restart the VM.

Second, how can I prevent this issue from occurring in the future? I.e. how can I ensure that the VM will resume after my system goes to sleep.

I should also note that the VM is located on external hard drive connected via USB 3.0. When I resume my desktop, the first thing I do is browse a folder on the external hard drive to ensure that it has spun up prior to waking the VM.

My configuration:

Windows 10 Pro

Workstation 11.1.4

VM resides on External HD

Log file is attached

thanks,

Mike

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MikeSzanto
Contributor
Contributor

I found a solution to get the workstation to wake up without losing the state it was in when it went to sleep.

The following article helped resolve the issue:
Forcing a frozen virtual machine to power off in VMware Workstation for Windows (2030543)

In short...

  1. Open Task Manager
  2. Set the Process Name column visible by right-clicking on any column header and then verifying that Process Name is checked.
  3. Kill the vmware-vmx.exe process (not the VMware Workstation application).

I assumed killing this process would shut down VMware Workstation, but it did not.

Instead, the power commands for the VM became accessible (were no longer grayed out) and I was able to resume the the VM.

mike

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