BSODs for VMs running on VMWare Workstation Pro on T40

Hi Guys,

My new T40 is just great and it's so good to be back home at Dell!

Just in case others do what I am doing, which is running VMs on VMWare Workstation Pro 16.x.

I found out I had to limit each VM to 1 core or they would overload the machine when they did their windows update checks. The T40 went to 100% CPU and the contention locked up the machine.

So each VM is limited to 1 core and it works just fine.

I have the full 64GB in the machine now and it runs 8 VMs at the same time quite fine.

But what I have observed is that each 5 days (3 times now) the VMs have BSODed at the same time.

The first time I guessed it was the windows server 2019 update starting that killed the VMs.

So I turned off windows update and they all ran again happily for 5 days.

Then they BSODed again and I rebooted.

And it happened again yesterday.

It was only the third time that I went and checked the logs to see how often this was happening.

And sure enough they were each 5 day intervals.

So I am wondering if anyone else here has experience on T40s running workstation pro and seeing such BSODs?

A friend also suggested I could run ESXi on the T40 and not windows server 2019 plus workstation pro.

I have checked the VMware manuals and I don't see T40 listed as supported for ESXi.

This would not surprise me if it was not supported because it is an entry level server.

But I thought it worth asking the question whether ESXi is supported on the T40 and might that be another way to go?

As you can guess I have only ever used VMware Workstations and not ESXi.

And this is the first time I have tried to run 8 VMs on Workstation.

Thank you for any advice you are able to offer in advance.

Best Regards 

Peter