I have a Win11 host and Win11 VMs on VMWare Workstation Pro v26.

Semi-randomly (although usually when I'm AFK), a VM will hang being completely unresponsive and the host will be at near 100% CPU utilization. I've discovered that if I start to suspend the VM but don't let it finish and cancel the suspension, it will usually, eventually break out of the hang. It sometimes takes a few attempts, but I haven't had to force-reset for the last few-dozen hangs.

This is super annoying as I use one of the VMs as a regular/primary machine. I'm not just spinning things up for a quick test (usually). My previous iteration of VMWare Workstation (v16) didn't have this problem at all.

Is there anything I can do to stop this?

Thanks.

We are a small-medium sized company. In June/July of 2025 we agreed to a 12 month license agreement with Broadcom after we had moved 70% of our virtual environment off of VMWare. Over the last year we have been moving more and more over, but we are not 100% complete and budgeted for one more 12 month term based on last year plus about 15% more, knowing they would probably go up.

As of now, our licenses will expire on July 31, 2026.

Our vendor started the process to get a quote from Broadcom 4 months ago. VMWare kept demanding that we send over our RVTools Data as their own script we used last year wasn't good enough. We were going to just do the same deal, same number of cores, same 12 month term. We even had to get on a video call to show our VMWare rep our environment. We complied with everything as we have nothing to hide.

We requested a 12 month term quote.

Finally, during the first week of July, less than 30 days out from our license expiration date, we received a 3 year quote. The per year cost increased by 20% over last year. We are not budgeted to pay 345% more than what we budgeted for.

We went back to them and asked them for a 12 month quote like last year, and they took their sweet time and came back and said they could do an 18 month quote at the very minimum. We would then have to fork out 18 months worth of money where we only budgeted for 12 months. It ended up being 85% more than what we had budgeted.

So, then we went back to see if we could reduce hosts and core count while still maintaining room for failure, we requested a new quote from Broadcom. This is actually what they sent to our vendor...

Email quote from Broadcom..

"We size renewals based on the RVTools export. If hardware is being retired before the renewal and you would like the core count reduced, we can apply that adjustment with a brief written attestation stating that the hosts are being permanently decommissioned and their VMware licenses retired.

Please note that this adjustment is only possible if we are outside the 30-day window before your renewal date. Within the final 30 days, we must proceed with the core count as it stands in the RVTools export."

They intentionally dragged their feet within the last 30 days before sending a quote so that once we actually saw how much it was going to cost, they could pull up their fabricated BS rules and deny us getting a somewhat cheaper quote.

I've never worked with a worse company. They are hell bent on destroying VMWare. In hindsight, we should have moved resources into moving 100% off of VMWare before this year. We definitely have it on the plan to complete over the next year (or 18 months).

Thank you for letting me vent and share my company's story.