Intermittent loss of sound

I am running CentOS 7 on a Dell 3620 workstation. I am running VMWare Player/workstation and various virtual machines - CentOS 7 and Linux Mint 20.2. The systems generally plays well together and I can use the sound on the host or on a virtual machine. Occasionally the sound will drop out and I cannot get sound from the host nor the VMs. Sometimes I can shut down or suspend the VMs and log out and back in or suspend and resume the host - sometimes a couple of times successively - and the sound will come back. Often I have to power down the host and boot it back up to restore the sound. This is getting old :( I would mention that the on-board sound on the workstation died a year or so back. I added a cheap PCI sound card which meets my needs. The issue did NOT start with the addition of the card.

I decided it was time to apply a bigger hammer. Perhaps reload the kernel drivers related to sound. For reference, here is my sound card infoCode:[ken@taylor20 modprobe.d]$ lspci -k | grep Audio
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation GM107 High Definition Audio Controller [GeForce 940MX] (rev a1)
07:00.0 Multimedia audio controller: C-Media Electronics Inc CMI8738/CMI8768 PCI Audio (rev 10)
Subsystem: C-Media Electronics Inc CMI8738/C3DX PCI Audio DeviceThe NVIDIA device is I think part of my video card. I do not use it nor do I know how to use it. I believe it needs a sound capable monitor and the appropriate video and sound cable which I do not have installed. I then looked for sound like kernel modulesCode:snd 83987 23 snd_hwdep,snd_timer,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_pcm,snd_seq,snd_rawmidi,snd_opl3_synth,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel,snd_mpu401_uart,snd_seq_device,snd_cmipci,snd_opl3_lib
snd_cmipci 44308 3
snd_hda_codec 136355 2 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel
snd_hda_codec_hdmi 52340 1
snd_hda_core 91007 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel
snd_hda_intel 40390 2
snd_hwdep 13608 2 snd_hda_codec,snd_opl3_lib
snd_mpu401_uart 14084 1 snd_cmipci
snd_opl3_lib 19053 2 snd_opl3_synth,snd_cmipci
snd_opl3_synth 19027 0
snd_pcm 101339 5 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel,snd_cmipci,snd_hda_core
snd_rawmidi 31553 2 snd_mpu401_uart,snd_seq_midi
snd_seq 62774 4 snd_opl3_synth,snd_seq_midi_event,snd_seq_midi_emul,snd_seq_midi
snd_seq_device 14356 5 snd_seq,snd_rawmidi,snd_opl3_synth,snd_opl3_lib,snd_seq_midi
snd_seq_midi 13565 0
snd_seq_midi_emul 17778 1 snd_opl3_synth
snd_seq_midi_event 14597 1 snd_seq_midi
snd_timer 30014 3 snd_pcm,snd_seq,snd_opl3_lib
soundcore 15047 1 sndI tried to remove some suspects for exampleCode:[ken@taylor20 Desktop]$ sudo rmmod soundcore
[sudo] password for ken:
rmmod: ERROR: Module soundcore is in use by: snd

[ken@taylor20 Desktop]$ sudo rmmod snd
rmmod: ERROR: Module snd is in use by: snd_hwdep snd_timer snd_hda_codec_hdmi snd_pcm snd_seq snd_rawmidi snd_opl3_synth snd_hda_codec snd_hda_intel snd_mpu401_uart snd_seq_device snd_cmipci snd_opl3_lib
[ken@taylor20 Desktop]$I also tried to modprobe -f on several modules but that did not fix the issue.

I poked around with the alsactl command without success. I cannot create the problem at will. It just happens. Rebooting this machine is a real pain as I have to shut down several VMs, unmount a Veracrypt continer, shut down, start up, unlock the full disk encryption, unlock and mount the Veracrypt container, unlock and mount a special purpose encrypted file system, start at least 3 virtual machines and launch the programs on each one for which they are dedicated etc. I guess I need a stable OS. My bad, that IS CentOS :D Any suggestions?

TIA,

Ken