After PD18 upgrade, Windows10 VM frozen after waking from sleep

Not 100% sure but I think I ended up resolving this by switching between the Apple and Parallels Hypervisor. One of them uses a lot of power and runs the battery down quickly (probably processing all those system events), so I get maybe 1.5 or 2 hours on a plane flight, and the other appears to suppress the events, but then has to catch them all up when it wakes up, which takes 30 sec to a few minutes of being nonresponsive.

 

Thanks for the response! I'll give that a shot (and hopefully report back). My hypervisor was initially set for "Apple" and I've now switched it to Parallels - we'll see what happens.

 

It's been a couple of days now with no issues. I've left my VM running for more than 24 hours, with my machine sleeping several times during that window, and haven't yet run into the frozen issue.

I don't really know what switching to the Parallels hypervisor vs. the Apple one means in terms of lost/gained capabilities (I seem to have a vague memory of switching hypervisors in the past for previous windows/parallels versions to resolve bugs, but don't recall the details), but I'm very glad to be functioning without the threat of a frozen VM.

Thanks BenMc for following up.

 

Cheers. In general Parallels is good but there are these niggling but quite serious issues they really should fix. It seems hard for them to repro. The other one that nearly killed me was that if you do time machine backups and it creates snapshots it can seriously impact performance - the VM pauses for several seconds randomly and you actually get timeout messages in the Windows Event Log from the VM disk drivers. These are the only two serious ones I've run across but they were *really* hard to work out.

 

Hi @BenMc @Stuartclan
Longtime Parallels users (since PD 3) and I'm experiencing the same freeze from sleep issues with PD18. I am running a mid-2018 Macbook Pro Intel processor and this has happened since upgrading to PD 18. I am always reluctant to upgrade for fear of encountering new issues like this one but upgraded earlier this year as I am planning to move to an M2 machine. Of course, now PD 19 is out...

I'll try switching the hypervisor as you described. My question is have any of you experienced performance / battery issues since switching to the Paralllels hypervisor? Are you both still seeing no recurrance of the freeze issue? Thanks!

 

Hey WestW53,
I have not noticed any battery/performance issues since my hypervisor switch - but I'll admit to rarely using my battery.

I'm now 1 month into my switch and I haven't had a single instance of the VM freezing upon wake - including several times where I've had the VM running for a couple days (and the machine sleeping numerous times). So for me, this feels like the culprit. It DOES feel like Parallels should try to discern what causes the freeze or is in conflict when using the Apple Hypervisor - but I'm very glad to have it working smoothly.

I haven't upgraded to 19 yet either for fear that my smooth-running MacBook Pro 16 (Intel CPU) will possibly have some issues...

 

Like I said in my OP, I've found that one option flogs the battery but has no freezes (but no noticeable effect when on power, which made me think it was a complete fix initially), and the other is good on battery but has the freezes.
Alos, just beware that on M1 or M2 only Windows 11 ARM will run. No older or non-ARM versions. I dropped several grand on a new Macbook Pro before I found that out - I need to run a bunch of old VMs back to XP and even Windows 2000. M$ just posted recently that most x64 apps work on the ARM version - it used to be a crap shoot as to whether a particular app would work, but it looks like they have a Rosetta-like interpreter/adapter. They carefully avoid guaranteeing it will work though, so I'm still not convinced. I just wish someone would write an interpreter to allow 32 and 64 bit Intel to run on a VM. It might be a bit slower, but I think this should be able to be done at a really low level, and with the extra screamingly fast M2 GPUs this should hardly even slow it down.