Hello,
I recently switched over to using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on my desktop computer. I installed VMware Workstation Pro 15.5.2 and have run into multiple cases where any of the guest VMs I run (Windows 10 or Ubuntu 18.04) cause my entire computer to freeze. The system becomes completely unresponsive and I have to hard reset with the power switch to recover.
I'm only running supported versions of guest operating systems and of course, Ubuntu 18.0.4 is a supported host operating system for VMware Workstation Pro 15.5.2.
Obviously, if I happen to be working on anything that wasn't saved at the time the host freezes up, it's completely lost!
I've tried switching the VM Tools in my Ubuntu 18.04 guest from open-vm-tools to use the official VMware Tools for Linux and the Windows 10 guest is running the most up-to-date version of VMware Tools that comes with VMware Workstation Pro 15.5.2.
I removed VMware Workstation Pro 15.5.2 and installed Oracle VirtualBox 6.1 instead. I don't experience the system freezes so there's definitely something awry with VMware Workstation Pro.
I found a few articles online that recommended a variety of changes including:
- Forcing VMware to rebuild the kernel modules:
- vmware-modconfig --console --install-all
- Switching from open-vm-tools to VMware Tools (as mentioned earlier)
- Limiting the amount of physical RAM available to virtual machines (host has 24 GB of RAM - I restricted the total amount available to VMs to 12 GB). I only had one VM running at a time and the maximum amount of memory allocated to any guest is no more than 6 GB for Windows and 3 GB for Linux
- Disabling khugepaged defragmenting:
- echo never | sudo tee /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag
I'm at a loss for what else to try. I rely on VMware Workstation, vCenter, and ESXi for other aspects of my job. Using Linux on my desktop has been an amazing change but not having Workstation is severely hindering my productivity!
Any ideas?
Thanks!