Win10 Client on Win11 Host freezes

[BluezNL]

I'm not entirely sure where to post this. I hope this is the right spot, as the problems seem to have started when upgrading to Win 11.

I've upgraded my day-to-day machine from Win10 to Win11 (Ryzen 5 3600 32 GB), and since then none of my Win10 VM's runs stable. They spontaneously freeze.

- Leaving VM at the log-in screen over an extended period of time will always freeze the VM
- Sometimes I see some interaction with the Win11 desktop (objects on the desktop are selected but I cannot interact with them.)
- Sometimes the VM machine appears to be frozen, but it does react to an ACPI shutdown (Machine / ACPI Shutdown)
- Sometimes the VM is completely frozen
- And sometimes it runs for hours without a problem (?)

The same VM's would run fine on the same hardware before installing Win 11 on the host.

I've tried different things (updated VirtualBox to 6.1.40, installed the proper extension in the client, removed the audio driver, removed hardware graphics acceleration, tried the different graphic controllers etc.) to no avail.

Host: Win 11 32 GB 16 core
VB: 6.1.40 r154048
VM: Win 10 8 GB 2 core

Any suggestions, or should I do the ultimate reset and rebuild the VM? (I'd rather not rebuild the host )

[scottgus1]

Do you happen to know if the old Windows 10 host OS had Hyper-V enabled? The new 11 install probably puts Hyper-V on.

Otherwise, pick one VM. Start the VM from full normal shutdown, not save-state. Run until you see the problem happen, then shut down the VM from within the VM's OS if possible. If not possible, close the Virtualbox window for the VM with the Power Off option set.

Right-click the VM in the main Virtualbox window's VM list, choose Show in Explorer/Finder/File Manager. In the "Logs" subfolder, zip the VM's "vbox.log", and post the zip file, using the forum's Upload Attachment tab. (Configure your host OS to show all extensions if the folder that opens does not show a .log file.)

[BluezNL]

Of course, now it doesn't freeze...

... and I didn't change a thing. But Windows might have thrown in another update, which might just have changed the behavior of client, host, or both. Argh!

[scottgus1]

Ah, gotta love those intermittent self-disappearing problems....

If it happens again, please post a log.

[BluezNL]

Yeah, it happens, again, and it got even worse. In utter despair I tried to 'reset' the Win10 client, at that 'reset' hangs at random points. Completely unpredictable.

[BluezNL]

Okay, here's the log.

[scottgus1]

Thanks for the logs. All the vbox.logs show that Hyper-V is enabled. See HMR3Init: Attempting fall back to NEM (Hyper-V is active)

[BluezNL]

Okay... reading through it.

[BluezNL]

To confirm:

I had to take the following steps to get rid of Hyper-V for now... I checked after each step if it was enough, and only after step 4 the turtle disappeared.

1. bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off
2. DISM /Online /Disable-Feature:Microsoft-Hyper-V
3. gpedit.msc Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Device Guard > Turn on Virtualization Based Security = Disabled
4. Settings > Device Security > Core Isolation Details > Memory Integrity = Off

The turtle is gone now. Thanks for the help thus far. Going to restore an older image and see what happens next... Interesting that the WinXP client didn't suffer. Then again, that's 20 years old and 32 bits...

[BluezNL]

Is it correct that the 'Paravirtualization Interface' in the pop-up (when hovering over the V icon) is still listing Hyper V?

[scottgus1]

'Paravirtualization Interface' is a comm channel for virtualization-aware OS's to talk to whatever hypervisor is running them, so they can run more efficiently. Setting this to Hyper-V does not turn on the host OS's Hyper-V. If you have the blue V, host Hyper-V is truly off.

[BluezNL]

Thank you for your help. Everything seems to be working fine now.

(I still suffer from a potential install data corruption on the Windows client side in combination with an 'always-on' VPN where Windows (10) tries to do something during shutdown and doesn't like the VPN app to have disconnected Windows from the Internet. For testing purposes I want this VM to only operate in the allocated region. However, the issue has nothing to do with VirtualBox. For now, things look good again.)

Again, thank you for your help!