Windows container crashes on Windows Stemcells created on vSphere with VMware tools 11.0.1-11.0.5

Products

• VMware Tanzu Application Service for VMs

Issue/Introduction

With a recent upgrade of the Windows Stemcell to 2019.17 or 2019.19, the Windows app instances start to crash intermittently with the following error messages in the Diego cell logs.

You see the following in the Windows app instances logs:

[ERR] process 7560 in container 5f3a986e-6210-478c-5063-0904 encountered an error during hcsshim::Process::Wait: lost communication with compute service

Environment

Product Version: 2.8
OS: windows2019

Resolution

The issue has been identified to be an incompatibility between the VMware Tools version 11.0.1-11.0.5 used while building Windows Stemcells for vSphere. 

A recent patch for VMware Tools has been released to resolve the issue. 

Please either use the latest patch or revert to the VMware Tools 10.x version for building Windows Stemcells.