Has vmware gone crazy? KB2059053

[HdeJongh]

Hello,

We are a cloud service provider with multiple clusters both 5.1 and 5.5

Every month we pay a lot for licensing and support to vmware (throught the VSPP program).

We have a mix of all kinds of OS's. And also we haven't got access to all of our vm's as we rent them to customers so they are the responsible for their vm.

On the first of January we had a PSOD on of our esx hosts. Vmware support concluded that it was due to the use of a E1000 nic.(the vm which showed in the PSOD doesnt even have a e1000, only vmxnet3).

Yesterday we have 3 PSOD's on different servers in a matter of hours. This resulted in the restart of 59 servers. Of those are multiple terminal servers so you can understand the mess...

Vmware again concluded it was due to the use of e1000 nic's.

But then it got really funny, they said there is a patch but they are just not releasing it. Cause it need to go through "extensive testing" so they dont release it to individual customers.

I tried to get more information (because we found out that are using e1000e in 2 vm's icm with win 8.1 since half december, one of those vm's was on all 4 psod's)

But apart from "yes we see it happening more often on windows 8.x and 2012" they wont tell me anything more.

Also they cant explain what exactly is happing and why it is happing. They say disabling RSS (e1000e only) solves the issue. So it is related to vm's with multiple cpu's then?

How come that such a huge issue (i have seen case back in 2012) isnt patch immediately.

Why dont they give a hotfix to customers. As im sitting on a ticking time bomb. I cant force my customer not to use e1000. I cant force freebsd to support vmxnet3.

I cant change appliances that i get from suppliers where i dont even have root access on.

today vmware is an amateur club in my eye's

Hans

[KenGore]

I completely agree with the premise of this thread. Vmware is acting like they support a few networks with a couple VM's on em. What about the 10's of thousands people have on a network? Are you going to change these nics for me? And what about the cloud provider. What is he supposed to do...tell his customers to change all their nics? This is ridiculous. Guess what...if you need extensive testing try giving it to the customers that need it. Release this update or at least release it by request. You CANNOT leave you customers in this position!

Until such a time where Vmware regains its sanity (Or I give up and move to Hyper-v) I have written a little c# app that changed my IP's back for me. I placed the source code and instructions at the link below. Please use at your own risk. It should work in your environment but it was written with mine in mind. I don't account for many situations but most will find that this will suffice and the rest can modify it if they feel its a good starting point. Sorry...best i can do given the crunch I am under also....still...more then VMware has given us

See KenGore's post. It was the 3rd post down at the time I placed it there.....

ESXi 5.1 & e1000 nics causing PSOD- Anyone else experiencing this major issue

[mplep]

Any patches coming for 5.5? I see 5.0 and 5.1 have been addressed. I'm awaiting something before I deploy a 5.5 cluster to replace 4.1 which is full of E1000.