Considerations
When running on a virtual machine, FME Workbench launches and displays a blank white screen with a toolbar. You can interact with the toolbar, add objects to the canvas through Quick Add, and hover your cursor over objects to get tooltips, but the objects added are not visible.
This has been observed and reported in FME 2023.x and newer.
Why This Happens
This may be related to running an older OpenGL version, such as 3.1, than is needed for FME 2023.0+ on your machine.
How to Resolve It
If this issue is occurring on a virtual machine, upgrade VMware Tools to 12.5.1 or newer in order to upgrade OpenGL to a minimum of version 3.3. For more details, please see this Q&A thread.
For any users unable to upgrade, the Q&A thread also documents two potential workarounds:
- Reverting to VMware Tools 12.4 OR
- Defining an environment variable SVGA_ALLOW_LLVMPIPE=0 and running FME in the same instance of the command prompt