I typically run anywhere from 6 to 20+ VMs on a 32Gb Windows 7 Host.
I have been running a lot of these hosts with little or no problems for the past two years with Workstation 9.x and 10.x
I upgraded to Workstation 11 last week and have had a number of issues that require me to reboot the host from under the guests to regain access to the running hosts. When I mean regain access, I literally mean that nothing will connect, any guests talking to the UI fail to respond, VMRUN will not access the machine, and killing the UI interface and starting another results in failure to gain ownership of the guest.
I get an error when starting a new machine "VMware Workstation cannot connect to the virtual machine.....Failed to connect pipe to virtual machine: All pipe instances are busy"
On further investigation of the VMware.log files it looks like the new USB interface is the cause of the problem. The last entries in all the logs are from the same time and show VUsbUpdateVigorFieldsAndAutoconnect: New set of nn USB devices, where nn cycles from 12 to 10 or 8 to 6 in less than one second. The cycle repeats 4 times and the log file stops.
I all cases I have USB configured not to automatically attach to the guest.
At the time the systems hung the host was locked as I had been away from the machine for a couple of hours, and it appears to have locked at about the time that I was unlocking the host machine.
(I have attached sample logs and as many of their VMX files I could attach to this note)
If this behavior continues I will be forced to down grade to VMware 10.0.4, since this is proving to be a major hit on my productivity.
Chris.