VMware ESXi host fails with PSOD after upgrading to 6.5 Update 1 (2151749)
Just when you thought it was safe to upgrade a Pink Screen of Death (PSoD) is confirmed. If you are thinking of upgrading from 6.5 u2 to update 1 you may want to hold off. This problem has no resolution and was officially documented by VMware on Oct 25, 2017.
Symptoms
- Upgrading to ESXi 6.5 Update 1 produces a PSOD.
- ESXi host using 10GB NICs
Cause
The bug is with the Netqueue commit phase. It abruptly stops due to a failure of hardware activation of a Rx queue. As a result, the Internal data structure of the Netqueue layer’s could go out of sync causing a host PSOD.
This is a known issue affecting ESXi 6.5
No current official resolution.
Workarounds:
- Downgrade ESXi to 6.0 U2. For more information, see Reverting to a previous version of ESXi (1033604).
- Disable NetQueue on the affected ESXi host. For more information, see the Disable NetQueue on a Host section of the vSphere Networking guide.
Caution: Disabling NetQueue can cause performance issues with network IO intensive virtual machines.