OS crashes in a multi-monitor Horizon VDI environment with 3D disabled

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

An intermittent OS crash occurs caused by the display driver vm3dmp.sys, which can be triggered by user sign-out, VM reboot, or changes to the number and size of screens.

During the crash, the console screen displays the error message: "What failed: vm3dmp.sys".
The virtual machine's vmware.log records the occurrence of a crash and a message indicating that a screen was destroyed (SWBScreen: Screen Destroyed) immediately before the crash.

vmware.log
YYYY-MM-DDThh:dd:ss.sssZ In(05) svga - SWBScreen: Screen 2 Destroyed: xywh(-1920, 0, 1920, 1080) flags=0x0
YYYY-MM-DDThh:dd:ss.sssZ Wa(03) vcpu-1 - WinBSOD: Synthetic MSR[0x40000100] 0x50
YYYY-MM-DDThh:dd:ss.sssZ Wa(03) vcpu-1 - WinBSOD: Synthetic MSR[0x40000101] 0x################
YYYY-MM-DDThh:dd:ss.sssZ Wa(03) vcpu-1 - WinBSOD: Synthetic MSR[0x40000102] 0x2
YYYY-MM-DDThh:dd:ss.sssZ Wa(03) vcpu-1 - WinBSOD: Synthetic MSR[0x40000103] 0x################
YYYY-MM-DDThh:dd:ss.sssZ Wa(03) vcpu-1 - WinBSOD: Synthetic MSR[0x40000104] 0x0

Environment

VMware Tools 12.5.2

Cause

This issue is caused by a memory synchronization issue when drawing the screen when the VMware SVGA driver is run in Display-Only Driver (3D disabled) configuration.

Resolution

This issue is scheduled to be fixed in a future release of VMware Tools.

Workaround
In Horizon VDI environments, this issue can be avoided by configuring Horizon to use its Indirect Display Driver (IDD) instead of the VMware SVGA driver to capture screen contents.
For the Horizon Agent registry configuration steps, refer to the Omnissa KB.
Horizon Agent Graphics Registry Settings (89193)
Target Registry Value Name: PixelProviderForceViddCapture (or ForceViddCapture)