This issue has been noted while and I thought to share this in my post as this was a common situation in Windows 8 and Windows 2012 Server in all our vSphere 5.5 environments, these virtual machines hang at splash screen without booting up the Operating System.

VMware KB article (2092807) clearly mentioned that, this issue is causing with the virtual machines configured with the virtual hardware version 10 (vmx-10), but I have seen some virtual machines lower than virtual hardware version 10 have the same symptoms when booting up the OS. I’m not quite sure this issue is limited to the virtual hardware version 10 (vmx-10) or that’s something wrong with our virtual machines. But we were able to fix this after following the same workaround.

Virtual Machines Hang at Splash Screen

This is how the the console looks like when the Operating system Loading, it is sitting in the same splash screen until we perform a manual reset of the virtual machine.

The cause of this issue explained as below:

This issue is fixed in below VMware ESXi versions:

Virtual Machines Hang at Splash Screen workaround Fix!

You can follow the below workaround to fix this splash screen and we were able to fix the similar issues in all our Windows 8 and Windows 2012 servers.

Power down the virtual machine, right-click and select “Edit Settings…“

Go to “VM Options” tab, expand “Advanced” menu click on “Edit Configuration…“

Add the “monitor_control.enable_softResetClearTSC = TRUE” parameter to the virtual machine (parameter and value is in separate columns, follow the screencapture to the parameter update)

Save the configuration and Power On the virtual machine, Windows Operating system will load without an issue.

If you found this post as useful please rate the post and share it!