VMWare Workstation Player 12 prevents Windows from shutting down

[dottaviano]

I am using VMWare Workstation Player 12 on a Windows 7 Embedded system and the guest system is Ubuntu. Everything works fine except if I try to shut the system down without first gracefully shutting the guest system down the shutdown process stops on the "please wait..." screen and the spinning indicator freezes in place. The system hangs in this state forever until forcefully restarted.

I have tried to write a script that auto kills the VM before shutdown starts however the same problem happens. If I kill the process in windows then the shutdown process hangs. The only way the system shuts down normally is if I never start the VM or shut it down properly.

Thank you for any insight you can provide!

[dottaviano]

Thank you for your reply. This is an embedded system and in our application the system needs to be able to be turned off by only hitting the power button as end users do not have keyboard access to gracefully shutdown the VM. The system also caches all disk modifications to RAM so on bootup the system is always in the same state. So a force quit of the VM wouldn't be the worst thing in our case. We just need the system to close the VM and shutdown without physical user interaction besides hitting the power button.

[scott28tt]

Any particular reason why you are using Workstation Player 12?

What is the guest OS version, and does it run either VMware Tools or open-vm-tools?

[dottaviano]

I appreciate all of your input! I went ahead and downloaded VMWare player 15 and I do not see the options discussed in your reply. All of the options I see are identical to VMWare Workstation Player 12. The shutdown issue persists with this version as well.

[dottaviano]

I am using that version because it's the version I have purchased licenses for. I went ahead and tried v15 as well in the trial mode but the same issue persists.

The guest OS Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS with open-vm-tools installed.

[scott28tt]

While it has not resolved your issue, you should note that only 15.5.5 and 15.5.6 support Ubuntu 20.04.

[scott28tt]

Has this ever worked? If so, what might have changed?

Have you tried with other guest OSes on the same system? If so, how did they behave?