Workstation 17.5 Causing BSOD on Windows 11

[TMWSales]

Host:
Dell Precision Laptop
Intel 11th Gen i9-11950H
64GB Ram
NVidia RTX A2000
NVME Storage
Windows 11 Pro fully updated
VM: Windows 11 Pro fully updated

I have done a clean installation of graphics drivers.  But I get a Host Blue Screen Clock_Watchdog_Timeout.  The mini dump files are saying for different reasons.

Had no issues with Workstation 17.0.2.  Upgraded to 17.5 and now my Windows 11 host is crashing with Clock_Watchdog_Timeout BSOD after letting the VM just sit idle and letting my lapto sit idle.  I appears to happen when my monitor goes to sleep after 20 minutes and no activity on the laptop.  I have removed and re-installed graphics drivers and tried previous versions.  I also disabled 3D hardware acceleration.  Still crashing and only started when I upgraded VM Workstation Pro to 17.5.0

[canado]

I have the same issue ...

[TMWSales]

I ended up removed TPM and the encryption.  Uninstalled 17.5 and installed 17.0.2.  Then redid the encryption and redid the TPM for my windows 11.  Now everything is working again.

I had tried to uninstall 17.5 and reinstall it, but that did not fix it.  They have a problem with 17.5 and I am going to stick to 17.0.2 for now.

[Dhairya Tomar]

 Unable to reproduce this issue both on my Windows 11 Host laptop as well as Windows 11 machine.

Requesting you to reproduce this issue and share the Windows Crash dump logs here.

[deepvise]

 Try copying large files into the VM from a NAS using bridged mode to reproduce the bluescreen.

For me, the system crashes at the latest after 20 minutes during the copy process.

[Dhairya Tomar]

 Please confirm where you are seeing this crash, host or guest?

 

[deepvise]

  It is always the guest system crashing. Both systems, host and guest are running Windows 11 Pro.
Bluescreen error is WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR.

[TMWSales]

I don't know if my copy of the crash files showed up. Here is a zip file of the mini dump files.  It is also 100% my host machine crashing.  I have since switched back to VMWare 17.0.2 and the problem has gone away and I can let my system sit idle.

I had tested my VM my just starting it up and letting it sit at the windows desktop.  I walk away and let my laptop sit idle.  After my monitor has gone to sleep I come back and the my host has restarted fully.

Attachment(s)

Windows Crash.zip   1.50 MB 1 version

[talking_mudcrab]

Are there any updates on this? Windows 11 guests are crashing since 17.5 here as well. 

[Dhairya Tomar]

 Can you please share the configuration of the Windows 11 VM which you have created as in RAM, Hard Disk Size,Number of processors and all.

[talking_mudcrab]

The VMs have 32GB Ram and 1 CPU with 12 cores allocated. The host is HP Proliant Gen10 with 384GB Ram and two CPUs. I have two Windows 11 VMs on it and sometimes they both crash at the same time with a blue screen. The HDD size is 512GB for each VM. 

[Dhairya Tomar]

  Ticket has been raised internally. Relevant team will look into the same.

[talking_mudcrab]

Thanks. My additional observation is that I haven't had a crash since I've downgraded the VM hardware to 17 from 17.5. The Workstation application is still on 17.5, I haven't downgraded that. 

[VMware Community Member]

My two-pennyworth on this in case other people are having the same problem (TLDR: try using something other than NVMe drives):

I had a motherboard failure that I decided to use as an opportunity to clean out all the rubbish and reinstall Windows from scratch. There was some stuff on my C: drive I needed to keep, though, so I restored a backup of my C: drive to a new virtual machine, so I could copy what I wanted to a Shared Folder. Host and guest are both Windows 11 23H2. VMWare Workstation Pro 17.5.0 Build 22583795. When creating the guest, I used all the recommended defaults except for memory, where I gave it 16GB instead of the recommended 4GB (the host has 64GB), and host-only networking, because I don't need the guest to talk to anyone else.

The restore of the backup worked ok, and Windows booted in the guest ok, but every time I tried to copy the stuff I wanted to a shared folder, I got a WHEA_Uncorrectable_Error BSOD in the guest after about 2 minutes. After about the 4th or 5th time, I figured this wan't going to work, so had a look at the mini dumps. All the dumps pointed towards a storage error, mostly involving stornvme.sys. So I decided to switch to a non-NVMe drive (see below if you're in a similar situation). I created a new VM and used a SATA drive instead of NVMe, and have had no problems since.

The ugly details of converting to SATA:

I don't know of a way to convert an NVMe drive to a SATA drive, so I decided to create a new VM and, because I didn't wnat to go through the many hours of restoring a 1TB backup, use the existing vmdk. For some incomprehensible (to me) reason, Workstation Pro does not allow you to attach an existing unencrypted drive to an encrypted virtual machine, EVEN IF THE VIRTUAL MACHINE IS NOT ENCRYPTING THE DRIVES. I totally fail to understand this - the existing drive on the virtual machine is unencrypted, so what difference does it make to add another unencrypted drive? Anyway, because of this I had to create a new WIndows 10 VM, without a TPM, and attach the existing drive to it as a SATA drive. I then minimally encrypted the VM, added a TPM, changed it to Windows 11 and booted. All worked ok.

[sharkinstx]

I am having this issue on Windows 10 Pro (22H2) and Windows 11 Pro (both 22H2 and 23H2) guests on my VMWare Workstation Pro 17.5 installation (the host is running Windows 11 Pro 22H2).  I also saw this on 17.0.2.  It started happening after doing an in-place upgrade of the host from Windows 10 to Windows 11.  I've manually rebuilt all the hosts.

It happens when I try to update the guests with monthly Windows OS updates.  This is regardless of whether the updates are coming down from SCCM, or downloaded from the Microsoft Update Catalog, and then manually copied to the guest and installed.

 

Sometimes the BSOD happens during the update install, and sometimes when it's copying the packages to the update cache.

I increased the amount of memory for the guests (Windows 11 23H2) from 4Gb to 16Gb.  That made one VM successfully update (manually copied file from Microsoft Update Catalog), but the second one still blue screens.

[deepvise]

I had these problems too a while back and fixed them by getting rid of the Hyper V remains on my system.

Maybe it helps for your cases as well:

Disabling Hyper-V hypervisor on Windows 11 Pro hos... - VMware Technology Network VMTN