VMWare Workstation VMs unresponsive after a period of time and CPU usage spikes

Question

Since I need to use WSL2, I turned on Hyper-V related features on the host

Since September, when I try to run Ubuntu22.04 and Kali VMs in VMWare Workstation, the VMs often turn out unresponsive on a random basis.

More specifically, the startup of VM is normal, but if we switch back to the host and left the VM background for a while (like 5~30 min), then turn back, the VM will sometimes become unresponsive.

At this moment, through the task manager you can find that the allocated CPU occupation is very high.

In some cases, the tasks running in the virtual machine also print "Soft lockup, CPU#~ stuck for ~ s ”

There are also several posts in the VMWare Workstation community reporting the same problem:
"Soft lockup, CPU stuck" on Red Hat guests after upgrade to Fusion 12.2.0
VMWare Workstation 16 Pro + Ubuntu 22.04.1 - VM unresponsive with high CPU

According to the discussion in the VMWare community, some users believe that the problem is caused by the installation of KB5017308

I did install KB5017308 and have recently installed the October KB5018410 update, but the problem still exists

Is there any solution or explanation of the cause of the problem?

My OS version:
Windows 10 Enterprise 10.0.19044.2130
VMware® Workstation 16 Pro 16.2.4 build-20089737

Answer 1

With all respect, this is a bug/change introduced by Windows Update and first included in the cumulative update for Windows 10 in September.

The problem has already been thoroughly debugged and debated in the VMWare community as indicated in the main question and it was brought here for further insight.

Somehow Microsoft have made a change to Windows/HyperV that breaks the resource sharing between Windows and the VMWare Workstation running in user mode (because Hyper-V is also present). This integration has been working for years and it would a nice move from the Microsoft/Windows community to help debugging into the cumulative update and find out which fix exactly provoked this issue as we do not have any way to break down the cumulative updates into pieces and uninstall fixes one by one.

And running the Window un-updated for several month by skipping cumulative updates is not an option either.

I understand that the change may be needed to fix a security vulnerability and then we need to work around it, but if it's a plain bug it could be fixed.

Please help giving us insight into why this change was made.

Thanks
Claus

Answer 2

in VMWare Workstation, the VMs often turn out unresponsive on a random basis.

VMWare is not supported here. Try asking for help here in dedicated forums.
https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation/ct-p/3019-home

--please don't forget to upvote and Accept as answer if the reply is helpful--

Answer 3

I used this advice

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-client/application-management/virtualization-apps-not-work-with-hyper-v

and even though my Hyper-V is not activated, I still deactivated it with PowerShell (reboot required)

Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V-Hypervisor  

It's been working for me for 3 days

Answer 4

I've been troubleshooting this issue for a few weeks now with varying results.
If running on a laptop, try disabling CPU power management in the bios. This feature on some laptops allows the CPU to reduce it's clockspeed to zero if there is no activity on the machine. This seemed to help in some cases.
Also, I noticed if the machine goes to sleep or hibernates, the VM is frozen when waking the laptop again.
I've opened a case with VMware and they've escalated it to their engineers.

Answer 5

Also tried:
Disabling Hyper V through powershell: no difference
Enabling Hyper V through powershell: no difference
Tried disabling suspend mode for the vm (http://woshub.com/disable-autosuspend-vmware-workstation-player/): No difference
Disable VBS: No difference
(Kindly check by disabling VBS From the Windows Settings and perform the following steps to disable VBS from the Settings app.

-Press Win + I to launch the Settings app. Navigate to the left-hand side menu and click on the Privacy and Security option.
-Click on Windows Security and then click the Open Windows Security button.
-Windows Security app will launch. Go to the left-hand side menu and select Device Security.
-Find the Core isolation section and click on the Core isolation details option.
-Now, check whether the Memory Integrity toggle is active or not. If it is active, click on it to disable the feature.
-Disable Memory Integrity
-Restart your system.)
Disable Fast startup: No difference