Windows Guest running on Red Hat 8 Host Constantly Hanging

[dbaslm]

I am running VirtualBox 7.0.6 on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8 Host and have an issue with Windows Guest VMs I have created.

I am running Windows Server 2022 as the Guest OS.

The guest OS hangs constantly, no pattern to when it hangs but doing an operation as simply opening the Start Menu will cause the guest VM to hang.

Last message I can see in the logs is:

00:01:29.931336 VMMDev: vmmDevHeartbeatFlatlinedTimer: Guest seems to be unresponsive. Last heartbeat received 4 seconds ago

I'll upload the logs.

[scottgus1]

The VM window wasn't closed before the log was taken, so there are diagnostic info missing.

However, the VM OS is probably under-provisioned:

00:00:03.190099 VirtualBox VM 7.0.6 r155176 linux.amd64 (Jan 11 2023 16:45:28) release log

Host CPU status:
00:00:03.949501 CPUM: Logical host processors: 8 present, 8 max, 8 online, online mask: 00000000000000ff
00:00:03.949952 CPUM: Physical host cores: 8
00:00:03.950690 Full Name: " Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2609 v2 @ 2.50GHz"
Guest CPU settings:
00:00:03.614874 NumCPUs <integer> = 0x0000000000000001 (1)

RAM settings:
00:00:03.190324 Host RAM: 64345MB (62.8GB) total, 49490MB (48.3GB) available
00:00:03.614874 RamSize <integer> = 0x0000000080000000 (2 147 483 648, 2.0 GiB)
00:00:03.616235 VRamSize <integer> = 0x0000000008000000 (134 217 728, 128.0 MiB)

For a Windows-11-based server OS, that's rather small. Try 2 processors and 4GB RAM. Then provide a new log, after the VM has been shut down, if the trouble happens again.

Note: there was some recent discussion of some possible trouble over Xeon processors, which I can't pin down just now. You might also try upgrading to 7.0.12 or the 7.0 test builds.

[dbaslm]

I've now installed VirtualBox 7.0.12 and increased the RAM to $Gb and set 2 processorts.

Still getting random hangs, again just navigating the the Start Menu.

Only way to close the VM was to power it off.

Log file uploaded.

[scottgus1]

Thanks for the changes and the new log. Unfortunately I cannot see why the VM is flatlining. Maybe a forum guru can suggest something.

[fth0]

I don't see a cause for the hanging either, but:

If your /home directory does not use the xfs filesystem, please move the VM there for a test and see if your issue persists. The background reason is that in the past, some users reported slow VMs when using either btrfs or xfs.

[dbaslm]

Thanks for checking, I've spoken to our operations team, and they have advised the host server running Virtual Box is quite old, and looks like I can get a replacement server with more recent specs.

Hopefully when that is in place I'll no longer get this issue.