Found issue with Windows 11 / VMware workstation under Proxmox 8

[70tas]

This is not a request for help but rather me, documenting my experience with Proxmox. I am using it in a home lab, and hope to be able to bring it up at work as a replacement for the 900lb guerilla.

So I’ve found the conversion of VMW vmdk’s to be onerous. First uninstalling the current tools,migrating off my current dying system, am-converting and bringing up the vmdks’ as new pve vm’s. I’m finding that even my retail MS licenses on Win8.1/10 are not maintained. For the newer VM’s I just bought new licenses. The older legacy systems, I thought I would move en masse with current VMW 16.2 to a pve VM. That was my intention anyway.
What actually happened is that the original 7.x pve environment stopped being able to run VMW on 8.x. I’ve read others with the same issue apparently caused by the newer kernel in pve. So re-installed VMW on a new system with Windows 11. Come to find out I had the exact same issue as I did under Proxmox.
To make a long story short, Windows 11 and newer updates of Win 10, have their own Hyper-v enabled. In VMW 17.5 an installation question prompts to load Hyper-v libs. What this means is you are no longer running VMware’s stack but Hyper-v, and you can no longer run nested hypervisors.
So, if you are seeing a similar issue, that is the problem. The answer on Win11 is to follow a one line command to strip out Hyper-v from Windows. You can then run a non MS hyper-visor with nesting.
Unfortunately that does not work when running Win11 and a VMW stack under Proxmox.

So we know what the issue is. To be cont’d as I progress with my migration.

If this post is not acceptable in this forum, please let me know, and I will not post any more.

 

[frankmanzhu]

I don't know if you ever get it working, but it's possible.
PVE 7 is ok with win11 with vmw 16 nested.
PVE 8 is ok with win11 with vmw 17 nested given that you need to add these for the win 11 vm

args: -cpu Cooperlake,hv_relaxed,hv_spinlocks=0x1fff,hv_vapic,hv_time,+vmx
cpu: host

or

args: -cpu host,hv_passthrough,level=30,-waitpkg

With extra parameters, it will be slower than just host, I believe.
My suggestion is to stick PVE7.

 

[70tas]

Args don't work. I've tried both Win11 and win8.1. VMW complains that HyperV is running.
Funny thing is that if I enable HyperV on Win11, it runs, but deathly slow.

 

[frankmanzhu]

Args don't work. I've tried both Win11 and win8.1. VMW complains that HyperV is running.
Funny thing is that if I enable HyperV on Win11, it runs, but deathly slow.

Hyper V is another issue. VMW doesn’t like Hyper V. You need to completely turn off/clean up hyper V. (Not from the GUI)

This might include a lot of other things you can’t use. E.g docker desktop, WSL, etc.
I remember I googled and use powershell to completely turn it off and clean up.

 

[70tas]

Tried all of that. I think there is something PVE provides that triggers the issue with VMWorkstation. No love with Win11 and VMw 17, or Win8.1 and VMw 16 either. None of the PS workarounds seem to work.
I want to keep my legacy VMs running, but I may have to have a physical. I may try VMw under Linux to see if there is a difference, but I’m concerned about graphics and audio.

 

[70tas]

There is something preventing VMWare workstation from 15.x to 17.x on running either on Win81x64 or up to Win11x64.
It keeps complaining that there is another hypervisor. As stated above, if I install Hyper-V on the Windows 11 VM, I can start VMW but it crawls so bad to be unusable.

So I installed Debian/KDE under Proxmox 8.1, and VMWare Workstation 17.5.2 in it. Had to get some help from search engines to install it fully, but it works. I'm running SPICE on Debian for the older VM's that don't have remote capabilities. I've only converted two of my systems over, but I will play with them for a while and see how reliable it is.

 

[frankmanzhu]

There is something preventing VMWare workstation from 15.x to 17.x on running either on Win81x64 or up to Win11x64.
It keeps complaining that there is another hypervisor. As stated above, if I install Hyper-V on the Windows 11 VM, I can start VMW but it crawls so bad to be unusable.

So I installed Debian/KDE under Proxmox 8.1, and VMWare Workstation 17.5.2 in it. Had to get some help from search engines to install it fully, but it works. I'm running SPICE on Debian for the older VM's that don't have remote capabilities. I've only converted two of my systems over, but I will play with them for a while and see how reliable it is.

That sounds great. I'll try Debian/KDE myself. I got windows working, but it definitely feel slower on the new kernel than the old 5.15 kernel. Maybe I'll go with your solution and see how it goes.