ESXi 4.1 host started crashing every few days - screen image included

[HHIndustries]

Hi everyone,

I'm really at a loss here.  I have an ESXi 4.1 host (free edition) which has 4 VMs on it. I haven't changed anything on this host recently but on Friday it crashed and I had to do a hard reset.  The same thing happened again today.  I have no idea where to start looking at this.  The host hardware is a couple of years old. lt is running 6 SAS disks in RAID, 24 GB of memory and 2 quad core Xeon processors.  What can I do to try to resolve this?

[grasshopper · Accepted solution]

From the PSoD:
"The Execute Disable/No Execute CPU feature not enabled for this machine"

Please check the BIOS on your ESXi host hardware to see if this option is available (usuaully under CPU options, advanced settings, or security on some white box BIOS).  If that options is not available in your BIOS, please feel free to share the hardware model in use (even if it's not on the HCL) as someone out there may be able to help.

Example of this error for older version of ESXi (4.0) here:
http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/install_upgrade_issues.php

[HHIndustries]

Thanks for the response.  I will look for these options and report back.

[HHIndustries]

I looked in the BIOS and I do indeed have this feature.  It was listed as "Execute Disable bit" and it was "Disabled'.  I enabled it and restarted it and we're now back up and running and hopefully we will stay that way.

I saw that message in the log but I kind of disregarded it because this server has been running for almost 2 years and has had no recent changes yet this problem just started occurring a few days ago.  Any clue why that might be?

Thanks so much for chiming in!  It is greatly appreciated.