v17.5 gets unsupported processor when Windows 10 Guest attempts update to Windows 10 22H2

[Garion6611]

Hi All,

I have Vmware Workstation Pro 17.5.0, my Windows 10 Guests (21H2) work fine until Windows Update tries to install 22H2 after which the vm will reboot and Blue Screen with unsupported processor. You can power off the VM and Restart it, and after 5 or 6 times the VM will boot, but Windows Update says it failed to install the update to 22H2. If you power-off/restart then it is a crap shoot on if the VM will bluescreen on restart or not.

I've searched the net, and the only article I found had people disable the Nvme driver in favor of the Sata drive in the VMX file.
However I am not using an NVME, my drives are Sata SSD's and the HD in the VM is set to SCSI.

My host is an AMD AM5 7950X with 64GB of Ram. All my VM's are kept on Sata SSDs, but VMWare itself is installed to the C drive which is an NVME (SN850X 4TB), my video card is a 7900XTX.

The guest is set to 2 processors with 2 threads, 8GB of Ram, 200GB SCSI Disk etc. All my vm's are set as using V16 Hardware Compat.

Any thoughts on resolving this?

[bluefirestorm]

You could check the vmware.log of the VM and look for the text "Monitor Mode". If it says ULM instead of CPL0, that means you have Hyper-V or components that require Hyper-V (such as WSL2) running on a Windows 10/11 host. If it says ULM, try removing Hyper-V and components that depend on it.

You can refer to this lengthy post. Not all situations are the same, so some steps may/may not apply.
https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Pro/Disabling-Hyper-V-hypervisor-on-Windows-11-Pro-host-to-get/m-p/2989411

Once Monitor Mode becomes CPL0, check to see if the Windows 10 VM update to 22H2 still fails or not.

[Garion6611]

bluefirestorm,

Sure enough Monitor Mode is ULM. I was trying out WSL2 to see if it made sense in our dev and testing environments, but it sounds like I cannot have my cake and eat it too. Thanks for getting back to me, I appreciate it.