I am using VMWare Server 2 and have created a Windows Server 2008R2 (x64) virtual machine.
Once that was set up, I tried adding some roles to the server, only for it to appear to freeze/lockup in the verifying installation part.
No need to worry, the server itself didn't really lock up, as you can remote in to the virtual machine just fine. The real culprit here are the VMWare video drivers.
The solution is to to into the control panel and uninstall the video driver and do a reboot/restart. The caveat with this, unfortunately, is that you no longer have the nice window resizing feature that you get with the VMWare video driver.
