Spent a few hours today troubleshooting this one, figured I’d post it here given the number of posts for help I ran across that didn’t have a solution posted. VMware 17 seems to be more problematic than previous versions…
The backstory. I use Workstation because of its linked-clones functionality. I run multiple Windows 10 VMs concurrently that rely on 3D acceleration and have been doing so for most of a decade now. Everything had been working fine up to this point. Then recently I upgraded my GPU from a 1080 Ti to a 4090, and all hell broke loose.
vcpu-0 PANIC: VERIFY bora\vmx\main\hostWin32.c:559
The first time I fired up the VMs they would panic with the above unrecoverable error. This could happen while WIndows was loading, or after five minutes, or even 30 minutes after I’d launched a game. There didn’t seem to be any pattern and the logfiles didn’t point at anything specifically. Only thing I noticed was that alt-tabbing out of games, closing down games, or exiting applications tended to trigger it most often.
So, the first thing I did was try to update Workstation from 17 to version 17.0.2. Anyone familiar with upgrading VMware knows the main program must be closed before the update executable will begin… low and behold, the updater had locked out the main program window so I couldn’t close it. But the main program had to be used to launch the updater, a perfect catch-22. With some incredulity it appears this is a common issue as I found multiple threads reporting the issue with 17.0.1 too. The easiest workaround is to just use task manager to kill the main Vmware program once the updater is ready, but this is not a good look for VMware Workstation given it’s a major bug any testing at all would’ve revealed. Let alone that it still hasn’t been addressed two versions later.
Anyhow updating didn’t fix the original problem and by now I tried a dozen other things, then I finally found an obscure, buried post in a vmware user forum about the refresh rates. I kid you not, somehow enabling any max refresh cap can break VMware Workstation if you are using 3D acceleration with two or more VMs. “Max Frame Rate” and “Background Max Frame Rate” can each individually break VMware, and my new 4090 has both that I’d set to 144FPS. I couldn’t get the VMs stable again until I’d disabled both settings. The post that had this miracle solution also indicated it affects AMD GPUs too, so it’s not just an NVIDIA thing.
Hopefully this will help someone and save them a bunch of time. 