64-bit applications not built with '/LARGEADDRESSAWARE:YES' flag crash

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• In 64-bit windows Guest VM, few 64-bit applications may crash (exit abruptly). The corresponding services for those executables may stop.

Few applications/services which are affected: Veritas NetBackup service / bpinetd.exe and Docker engine for Windows.

Environment

VMware Tools 11.x

Cause

In VMware Tools 11.0.0, a new plugin called 'appInfo' was bundled. This new plugin runs every 30 minutes (can be configured by the guest administrator) to capture the information about running processes. For this, the plugin creates a remote thread in the target 64-bit process to capture the 'command line' of the target process. If the 64-bit application of the process is not built with '/LARGEADDRESSAWARE:YES, 'the remote thread' crashes the application.

Resolution

This issue is fixed in VMware Tools 11.0.6. For more information, see VMware Tools 11.0.6 Release Notes.

Workaround:
To work around this issue, turn off the appinfo plugin inside the guest VM using vmwaretoolboxcmd.exe config set appinfo disabled true.