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I've installed Debian 9.3 stable on a VM in ESXi 6.5.0d. I'm running XFCE 4 as the desktop environment and have XRDP installed. I'm using the default configuration with exception of setting the session using:

echo "xfce4-session" > ~/.xsession

and changing the file /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config to set the flag:

allowed_users=anybody

After a reboot of ESXi, Remote Desktop Clients from Windows 10 appear to be able to connect once or twice but after that the VM will freeze up when trying to connect to it. (When loging in though, it does not show a desktop, just the default cyan / blue screen.) If I restart ESX the same behavior can be reproduced. Once the VMs start to freeze they always freeze until ESXi is restarted. While the VM is frozen, ESXi is still responsive however.

Debian seems to be in a infinite loop as the CPU allocated to it is maxed out at 100% and stay like that until I reset the VM. Unfortunately all services on the Debian host dies and it does not accept and IO or SSH connections etc. Any existing SSH connections time out not leaving much room for debugging.

XRDP is set to DEBUG log levels however there appears to be nothing of value (errors, warnings, etc) in /var/log/xrdp.log, /var/log/xrdp-sesman.log or /var/log/syslog. I've also enabled Debug Logging for the VM in ESXi, but I can't see anything of value in there either.

TightVNC seems to behave similarly, however it freezes the VM immediately.

Google and I am out of ideas. Any thoughts on where to go from here or what to try?

Vinnie
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2 Answers2

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Did you happen to see this post?

I'm literally doing the same thing you are, and I've been having trouble keeping a stable connection. I tried the recommended solution on there regarding changing the network adapter from the default "VMXNET 3" to "E1000e" in VMWare, and so far so good.

I'll update this post if I lose connection again.

Jordan Bell
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  • No, other applications like SSH seemed to run fine so I was fixated on searching for xrdp / vnc related issues. Changing to E1000e (and testing for a few hours) seem to have fixed it Thanks! – Vinnie Jan 21 '18 at 15:02
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I was running into a similar issue with Debian -- the only thing that eventually remediated this for me was to update ESXi to a newer patch. It looks like the same issue was hit by this person as well -- https://askubuntu.com/questions/957660/ubuntu-16-4-lts-freezes-when-running-as-a-virtual-machine-under-esxi-6-5

Andrew Schulman
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Melanie Cooper
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