At work, I'm currently deploying a Windows 2008 R2 on a VMware ESXi 4.0, and noticed an odd behaviour. At irregular intervals, the console of the guest OS simply locks up and doesn't do anything anymore. Networking and remote access seem to work fine, it's just the console that is freezed. Restarting the vSphere client doesn't help, and the only way to get rid of the problem is by hard-resetting the VM. The issue only occurs on Windows 2008 R2, the other VMs run fine.

The problem is caused by the VMware SVGA II driver, and has two underlying issues: the driver itself, and an apparent lack of   ...