VMware Products and Screen Savers

When remote console screen savers activate while a virtual machine is running, several problems can occur:

The screen may appear to go completely or partially blank
The system may not appear to respond to keystrokes
The system may appear to be hung with a blank screen
The virtual machine's BIOS spins while in BIOS Setup or when displaying no operating system found, consuming CPU resources

Some reasons why these issues may occur include:

The virtual machine has a high scheduler priority and the guest operating system is busy.
You are running a guest operating system that has an idle-loop that does not behave well (the virtual machine competes with the screen saver running at a lower priority).
The remote console automatically releases the keyboard focus once it detects a screen saver starting. This situation can occur often, since a virtual machine that has input focus has a high scheduling priority.
You have the input focus in a virtual machine and leave the management workstation for some period of time.

Typing some keystrokes should deactivate the screen saver, although if it cannot get priority to run, the machine may take several minutes to appear to respond. Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del and waiting for the security panel to appear may speed this process.

VMware recommends that if you are having this problem you should disable the screen saver.