PSOD PF Exception 14 - ESXi 5.5 1331820

[vmnomad]

Hi there,

Our ESXi host has failed with PSOD 3 times over the last three months - see the screenshot of the last PSOD. Every time it happens after about 30 days of uptime.

Unfortunately we don't have support contract (only subscription) so I can't escalate this issue to VMware support.

It is definitely not the issue with E1000 driver in VM. The host has only 1 VM. That VM is quite big  - it has 22 vCPUs and  62GB of RAM  whereas host has 24 logical processors and 64GB RAM.

I suspect that the PSOD can be caused by wrong sizing of VM.  Considering that memory overhead for 22 vCPU / 62 GB VM may be quite high (currently it is 502 MB)  that can be the case.

On the other hand the ESXi host would just swap out the VM's memory if there was a memory contention between ESXi kernel and the VM.

Anyway, I would be happy to hear any advice.

Thanks.

[rcporto · Accepted solution]

Your error looks very similar with the error addressed on this KB article: VMware KB: An ESXi 5.x host running on HP server fails with a purple diagnostic screen and the error...

[vmnomad]

Hi Richardson,

thanks for pointing me the right KB. Checked the HP driver version and looks like it is the case.