I've searched the Siemens literature and have not found any guidance.

Originally we set up a VMware vm running windows 7 pro and WinCC RT Adv V14 and it ran flawlessly for years. When we upgraded to V16 we bought a proper license for win 10 pro and set up a new vm from scratch. We have found stability is a problem in this new setup The runtime causes the guest to freeze. Specifically HmiRTm.exe is the offending process. It says an instruction referenced memory at a certain address and the memory could not be written. But it takes windows with it. It's froze up. I managed to extend time between crashes by disabling all power save, screen turnoff, hard drive turn off, even screensavers. In both just and guest. Once it sits for a couple days (like a weekend) without operator interface then it crashes. If we keep using it it seems to last longer. But it's not exact timings. It can vary.

My local distributor suspects an incompatibility in windows 10, running in a vm, and HmiRTm.exe. But we can't seem to find any cause. I want to keep the vm setup because it makes restoration and backup so easy. 

Is there any official or unofficial knowledge concerning this? Ideas? Thanks!

That was one of the first things I did (ensure using all available updates to portal engineering and to runtime, as well as for windows and even for VMware workstation professional V16).

I did take a look at the system requirements and so far nothing stands out. My VM has 16gb ram configured and I think 1 processor with 2 cores. I recall hearing that with V14 I think that portal wasn't multi core capable. I could always try increasing processor and cores count in the vm.

Do you know anything about the ability of portal to take advantage of multiple cores.

Other than that I'm stuck. Maybe this is why it's not released for virtualization. What bugs me is this same project used to work fine under V14. Granted that vm was windows 7, so maybe that's the key difference here. 😎

I never got around to updating my projects to v17 as then I would need to get updated runtime licenses and honestly I was being cheap. I have the SUS for my engineering so I have the updated license, just never installed v17. I suppose that's another option to try!  But by this point I should wait untill v18 is released to buy the upgraded RT licenses. I have 3 systems to upgrade. Any estimate when v18 release date is?

Win 10 Pro 21H2.

WinCC RT Adv V16 UPD5.

That is a good idea. I am not sure when I will have time to do it though. The ISO I downloaded from my distributor already had the 21H2 in it which is why I used it. I will need to look where I can download a 21H1 ISO of Win 10 Pro. I will need to research how to de-activate my license key for Windows so I can re-use it again. 

Thank you for the idea!

I did follow the advice given here by the Professor, and I created a new VM with version 1903 of Windows 10 Pro.  So far it is stable and has not crashed in several days (almost a week now I believe). Whereas in previous 21H2 version it would go maybe 1 or 2 days before a crash.

The strange thing is that I have another system which is not using a VM, but has WinCC RT Advanced V16 installed directly onto a Windows 10 Pro 21H2 machine, and I've not had issues there (yet...lol). 

But it would appear that for a VM application that the system requirements are indeed a limitation and must be respected.

Thank you for the insight.