ESXi host fails with a purple diagnostic screen PSOD

Arun N. — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 18:13:13 +0000

This happened while converting KVM VMs to VMware and power them on (method used: http://arunnsblog.com/2013/06/10/migrate-kvm-virtual-machines-to-vmware-esxi/) . It works for a while but then the ESXi crashes with PSOD.

Version : 5.1.0-799733

There were two sort of PSOD messages observed:
1) Crashed while the VM was running

 VMware NOT_IMPLEMENTED bora/vmkernel/sched/memsched.c:17724
 Code start: 0x41802b200000 VMK uptime: 10:19:25:27.335
 cpu4:8243)0x412200cdbaf0:[0x41802b27abff]PanicvPanicInt@vmkernel#nover+0x56 stack: 0x3000000008
 cpu4:8243)0x412200cdbbd0:[0x41802b27b4a7]Panic@vmkernel#nover+0xae stack: 0x100000000000000
 cpu4:8243)0x412200cdbc50:[0x41802b3d88eb]MemSched_WorldCleanup@vmkernel#nover+0x426 stack: 0x4100018a4fb0
 cpu4:8243)0x412200cdbef0:[0x41802b3033b8]WorldCleanup@vmkernel#nover+0x1cb stack: 0x4700cdbf40
 cpu4:8243)0x412200cdbf60:[0x41802b303829]WorldReap@vmkernel#nover+0x318 stack: 0x0
 cpu4:8243)0x412200cdbff0:[0x41802b2483c8]helpFunc@vmkernel#nover+0x517 stack: 0x0
 cpu4:8243)0x412200cdbff8:[0x0] stack: 0x0
 cpu4:8243)base fs=0x0 gs=0x418041000000 Kgs=0x0

VMWare_ESXi_PSOD

2) Crashed during ESXi reboot.

#PF Exception 14 in world 8243:helper13-1 IP 0x41802b880a1e addr 0x410401503020

VMWare_ESXi_PSOD

This seems to be a known issue in VMware ESXi 5.1 and is resolved in patch ESXi510-201212401-BG (Build 914609).
Ref: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2038767

To work around this issue, SSH to the ESXi host and increase the MinZeroCopyBufferLength to 512.

# esxcli system settings advanced set -o /BufferCache/MinZeroCopyBufferLength -i 512

To verify that the setting has been updated, run this command:

# esxcli system settings advanced list --option /BufferCache/MinZeroCopyBufferLength

Before and after change

ESXi – Arun’s blog

ESXi host fails with a purple diagnostic screen PSOD