RHEL 8.10 VM hangs after updating open-vm-tools to 12.3.5

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

A virtual machine running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10 may become unresponsive following an upgrade of the open-vm-tools package. This state often persists until a reboot, after which the symptoms may recur.

Cause

The open VMware tools version 12.3.5 has some bugs and RHEL is currently working to fix it with their engineering team. 

Resolution

Contact RHEL for updates on when they will package an updated version of open VMware Tools to address this issue.

As a workaround, the open VMware tools can be downgraded to an earlier version than 12.3.5.

NOTE: open-vm-tools which are bundled and delivered with the guest OS do not fall under the scope of Broadcom VCF Support and the issues seen must be looked further by the respective OS vendor. 

Additional Information

Reference documents: 

• System hangs or hung_task panic due to filesystem deadlock caused by 'vmtoolsd' mkdir in /tmp which is frozen
• VMware support for open-vm-tools