VMs Win 11 Pro Frozen

[SommyJo]

I've been using a VM for months with no problems.
Yesterday it crashed after a few minutes.

Constantly trying to turn it back on, on one occasion I managed to do all the Win Updates that were missing and then worked late into the evening.

Same joke today and no Win Update to do.

To work I have to install a new VM.
After a few minutes the VM installation also hangs.
I try to restart another Win 11 Pro VM and it crashes almost immediately.

An Xubuntu and Win 10 Pro VM would seem to have no problems instead.

So it's a Workstatio Pro (17.0.2 build-21581411) issue with Win 11.

[Technogeezer]

Can you provide some more details on what happens when the VM crashes? Is it an issue where Workstation crashes, or the Windows VM crashes? If it's Windows crashing in the VM, what's the stop code in the blue screen?

What build of Windows 11 are you using?

[SommyJo]

It doesn't crash, it freezes.
I've tried leaving the task manager active with active processes.
After a few minutes the screen froze and after a few hours it was still in that state, frozen.

The Workstation works; as I said I can shut down the VM or start other VMs (Linux or Win10 Pro).

All Win11s have this problem, regardless of their version.
I tried downloading the latest ISO available from Microsoft and running it with the default VM parameters. it freezed while it was installing.

[norbert-wnuk]

The very similar issue occurs for me on Ubuntu 22.04 (from time to time). The VM continue to work in the background, since you can SSH into it, however all attempts to restart vmtools, gdm, gnome session, etc. not bringing back the ability to interact via mouse and keyboard (the input is still being grabbed). Kernel and VM logs do not contain anything interesting (except usual toolbox-dnd timeout message).

[SommyJo]

If you don't understand the problem, here is a screenshot.
The VM has been on for less than 2 minutes and this panel has been in this condition for at least half an hour.
Instead, the host (win 10 Pro, updated with the latest Winupdate), and all the commands in the workstation menu work.

[SommyJo]

My Host PC is relatively clean.
Not being bare metal like ESXi and not even a dedicated PC, some applications are necessarily installed.

These are the applications installed (for months) in Win 10 Pro (last update): Printer, Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, Thunderbird, a program for electronically signing documents, Powertoys, vncserver, Crucial Storage Executive, Samsung Magicians, Wamp Server (for local website development).

With this configuration (and on other occasions other software was also installed) I worked for months without problems.

The only doubt is that days ago I installed several VC++ Redistributables for the use of different PHP versions in Wamp Server, but it seems impossible to me that these can conflict with the VMs and only those with Win 11.

In any case, needing to work with these VMs, yesterday morning I formatted the PC and installed Win 11 Pro.
Only Dropbox and Google Drive are installed on this now.

Now the 11 VMs are still working.

Even the other day the VMs didn't start and the next day they started working again.
Now let's hope they continue to work tomorrow. 😉

[dawid_dudek]

Hi,

If problem will return you can try this tips - I had something similar and I need to disable some Windows features like they did it here:
https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-fix-vmware-bsod-error-windows-11/

Have a nice day,
Dawid