Just to confirm, did you also set the device into inclusion mode after starting discovery? The inclusion/discovery will end after a minute (configurable in the controller Thing) and the Things should show up in your Inbox and will then need to be added.
Since you are still having issues, you may want to try this again because this could definitely be causing the issue. You could also do a full reset on them too.
You could be having an issue because of running in a VM. What do you see in Habmin when you drill into the controller and how is it configured (you can post screenshots into the forum)?
You may also need to look at some logs to see if the controller is actually functioning by running log:set DEBUG org.openhab.binding.zwave in the Karaf console, but remember to set this back to WARN when done looking at the logs. Check the logs from an OH restart. This post has some details on doing this in real-time. But you can also setup VS Code with the OH Extension to easily get into Karaf and do the logging from there.
This could be a complex issue, so it will be good to get the basics out of the way before drilling in too deep!