Recent Windows 10 (since 1809) can behave weird (slow) when running on ESXi.
Symptoms are long reboot windows virtual machine or slow windows updates.
Communities users are reporting
VMFS6 - 8 Snapshots - Windows 10 1809 - Boot time 8-9 Minutes VMFS5 - 8 Snapshots - Windows 10 1809 - Boot time - 40 Seconds
This are prerequisites for the issue:
- VMFS6
- thin provision disks
- virtual machine have snapshots
- recent VM hardware (newer than 11)
Root cause of this issue is that MS changed something and VMware need to make fix:
The issue is identified to be due to some guest OS behavior change in this version of windows 10, 1809 w.r.t thin provisioned disks and snapshots, this has been confirmed as a bug and will be fixed in the following releases – 6.5 U3 and 6.7U3, which will be released within End of this year (2019).
More in this VMware communites post.