I'm running ESXi 6.7 on a dell server, with some Windows 10 guest VM's. I'm managing VM's through the ESXi web interface. VMware guest tools are installed.
Whenever I shut down or restart VM's through the ESXi interface or directly in the VM (via RDP), they get stuck and won't fully turn off. I can still open the console and see the "restarting" screen, but it just gets stuck there indefinitely. The white twirling icon stops moving. This is what I see:
I need to hit Power Off to get it to fully shut down and into a state where I can start it back up again. Reboots / shutdowns initiated from inside the VM result in the same behavior, so if someone reboots from an RDP session in the VM, it will never come back online until you shut it down manually in the ESXi console.
Any help would be appreciated, I don't really know how to troubleshoot this. The only thing I can see under "recent tasks" is all the power off / reboot guest instances say "completed successfully".
*Edit*: I just discovered that this only starts happening AFTER I've installed VMware guest tools. If I uninstall the tools, the shutdown / reboot (initiated from inside the VM) work properly. I'm still lost...