VMs get stuck on entering POWERING_ON, fail to start

[AYN57]

Virtualbox Version 7.0.14 r161095 (Qt5.15.2) on MacBook Pro with 2.3 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9 and macOS Sonoma 14.2.1 (23C71). When I try to start a Ubuntu VM (mostly debugged the unattended install first boot, but initially hit this with a VM that I created a few months back and that used to work), it gets stuck in "Starting" state, with the last line in the log file:

00:00:04.383220 Changing the VM state from 'CREATED' to 'POWERING_ON'

I used to be able to run VMs on this machine without any issues, but it was a few months back, and I likely upgraded MacOS since. Now, cannot run any VMs After hitting this issue for the first time, upgraded VirtualBox to latest, rebooted the Mac, deleted my VM, and tried to recreate it from scratch (using the unattended install scripts I have), and it does not work...

[granada29]

You should start your VM, let it run until you hit the error, then shut it down.

Then zip the VBox.log file and attach it to a post here.

Right-click on your VM name in VirtualBox Manager
Choose 'Show in Finder' from the pop-up menu
In the Finder window of the VM you will see a folder named Logs
Open this folder and right-click VBox.log and choose Compress to create Vbox.log.zip

[AYN57]

Log file. I replaced some local path names/VM name with XXX, otherwise unchanged.