Hi, Yeap. I've fighting the same. x3850 M2 hosts which ran for 300-400+ days on ESXi 4.0/4.1+ without so much as a blip using the standard VMware Install CDs have been looming mad since going to 5.0 + any vSphere updates it seems made after March 2012. The initial 5.00 seems much more stable.
Since updating hosts after March's drops:
I've had memory errors surface which have NEVER been reported before on multiple hosts. These may be a function of loading.
I've had solid host LOCK UPS multiple times on multiple machines now where the console just freezes no PSOD, nada just frozen. No errors in the logs which VMware can decipher even after capturing them immediately after a reboot. No errors in the RSA for HW. Frozen and dead. Power off/on.
I've opened numerous problems with VMware on this.. and also worked with IBM from the Hardware side on some of the bad DIMMs... which IBM says due to the memory RAIDing tech in play, ESXi should never have seen the Protextion error because it was effectively masked but it's too much of a coincidence that we have Protextion events and lockups coinciding with those events.
I suspect these are driver issues: Broadcom onboards, Intel NICs, Qlogic HBAs and LSI RAID cards are the top culprits.
What IS news is that VMware is NOT loading the latest drivers into these updates. I was told "you have to do that yourself..." and trust me, finding the correct drivers down in the bowels of ESXi and loading them separately is a major hassel.. not to mention ensuring you can find the right driver on VMware's web site and whether it's in or out of play.
What should happen is vSphere's Update Manager should identify the drivers running on the HW then allow the admins to download the drivers just like patches or updates and then install them if they are selected for the UM update.
Instead, I have to spend hours chasing what I hope are the correct drivers, then downloading them, then installing them manually into Update Manager, then using UM to patch all these hosts..
VMware needs to be loading the current drivers into updates more frequently and automating the support for automatic driver loads.
I believe, based on my gut and what you have said, that this IS A DRIVER ISSUE and the only way we are going to restore stability will be to update the drivers I mentioned to the current levels and hope that 5.0 Ux or 5.1 plays nice.
And BTW, we flash our Firmware and BIOS to the latest levels and January 2012 and usually everytime we do a major upgrade so that's 1x or 2x a year. With the older hardware, the firmware updates will be less frequenent because the platform is supposedly mature and stablized.
G. Mobley
Later,
GC Mobley
