Container crashing shortly after login

The VMDK and VHDX images of TrueCommand have been deprecated in favor of a simple-setup routine that can be run on nearly any pre-built image compatible with your specific virtualization platform of choice (Windows or Linux images only).

Please see the details on our updated install page here: https://www.truenas.com/docs/truecommand/tcgettingstarted/install/vmdeploy/

Or directly on the GitHub repository hosting the installation routines:
https://github.com/ixsystems/truecommand-install

Bringing in the QE team to try and reproduce the VMWare/VMDK runtime issues.

P.S.  The only setting change I made on the VM while troubleshooting; I noticed it was not in the same timezone so I used timedatectl to set the timezone to America/Chicago so the time matched my other systems.

In VMware I used the E1000 NIC and did not attempt to install VMware tools, but I can try that if you suggest it.

In my office at work I am located next to the datacenter (DC).  I have a HP laptop with an i5 4core, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD SATA drive.  The laptop is docked in a HP Advanced 120W Docking Station with dual DVI 24" Viewsonic Monitors.  I have Oracle VirtualBox installed on my laptop.  My docking station is plugged in to a Cisco 2960S PoE Gigabit distribution switch in the DC.  The 2960S is uplinked to our Cisco 9300 Layer 3 Stack that is the distribution of our subnets (VLANs).  My laptop is in VLAN 4.  In the DC are three Supermicro servers that have been running FreeNAS 11 for a long time and last upgrade was to 11.1-Release.  They are connected to the 9300 stack and in VLAN 151.  Last Tuesday I upgraded two servers to TrueNAS Core 12.0u1.  After that I decided to try Truecommand.  I download the vmdk from the web site and it gave me v1,2.  Using VirtualBox I created a VM for Debian 64-bit, copied the vmdk into the folder, pointed the VM to use it as an IDE drive and booted.  I had a problem getting past the signup step but after several tries it finally took and got me to the login step and main page to add a system.  When I tried to add the first system it gave a middleware daemon error and back to the login screen.  I signed up for the portal and found it had the download for 1,3,2, so I downloaded this version and tried it on the same VirtualBox but had the same reoccurring problem.  Same issues of retries getting me closer and now I started learning command to look at the service status and the journal to see what was happening.  Each time I was getting sent back to the login was after the service failed and self restarted.

We have 5 VMware ESXi v6.7u3 hosts (licensed), use Veeam Backup & Replication v10a (licensed) and with iSCSI protocol the Veeam server is connected to the three NAS servers in the DC.  All the host and NAS are on VLAN 151.  I tried creating a VM on a VMware host for Debian 10 64-bit and linked to the 1.3.2 vmdk file, but when it booted it spit out a lot of not writeable errors and didn't work. Then I tried the 1.2 vmdk and it booted up just fine.  However I never got through the sign up step,  The service failed every attempt and self restarted, it did start successfully and this VM was in the same VLAN as the NAS and all connected to the same 9300 Layer 3 stack.

Hope this helps.

So I have been trying to reproduce this here, but so far I am not able to get TrueCommand 1.3.2 to crash like you are reporting.
The main difference I noticed from the report was the "offline" nature of your deployment, so I tried to reproduce that here by simply unplugging the network cables from my test system both before starting and while the TrueCommand instance was running, but this had no adverse effects to TrueCommand (aside from losing connection to the NAS's - which was expected).

Can you please give me a quick step-by-step of what you are doing to get this result so that I can more easily try to reproduce it?
In particular:
1. Which VM image are you using?
2. How are you running the VM?
3. Are you making any changes to the VM?
4. At what point does TrueCommand stop working and then refuse to startup cleanly again? (pre-admin-account creation, pre-login, post-login, after changing XYZ, etc..)