Purple screen on ESXi 6.0

[MMazzei]

I am having a bit of troubles with my ESX. Suddenly it crashed earlier today and every reboot I have a Page Fault purple screen that I can't get anything from who comes up...

It runs on a Dell PowerEdge R710 that we recently bought (second hand), and I just finished the configurations last week and wanted to put some productive VMs on it today.

Here are the steps of what I did since I got it (not sure that anything I did could really impact) :

Last week :

- Setting the IPs/pwd/networks etc...

- Adding the ESX in our vCenter

- Configuring the SAN

Today :

- Migrating a couple VMs from our old ESX to the new

- Testing said machines

- Launching a conversion from a physical machine to the ESX

And there it happend just at the start of the conversion (vCenter Converter Standalone shows a "failed at 1%").

One more point that struck me is that during the boot we see the IP of the ESX and the IP shown is not the one I configured last week but the old one that was used (who is not the default IP of a R710) and that doesn't really make sens to me either...

Here is the Purple screen :

[ptwisterling]

How is your host connected to the SAN? It looks like it is unable to create the requested filesystem on your storage.

Can you try to create an empty VM on your host? Does that work?

[MMazzei]

The SAN is connected via iSCSI, and it seems that the problem comes from here indeed. The host has no troubles booting if I disconnect the host from the network.

Strangely enough now when I tried to remount the SAN datastores it crashed instantly again...

Creating a new VM on the host works properly so it's definitely a problem regarding the host-SAN connection.

But the connection was active since friday (but with nothing actually using the SAN, the remote datastores were just mounted). And I had the time to migrate 2 VM on the SAN before the first crash and test them, so the initial configuration doesn't seem that bad either...

Here some info about the SAN, don't know what actually might help :

it's a dell powerVault md3000i, using unidirectionnal CHAP, both iSCSI ports and management ports are on the same network (haven't fount anything saying it's not good practice, but i'm considering that might be the problem? will test)

At the moment only the new host connects on him, and it displays 2 raid 6 virtual disks to the host.

[RajeevVCP4]

please attach vmkernel logs or vmkernel-zdump logs

Date/Time when it was down

[RajeevVCP4]

Extracting the log file after an ESX or ESXi host fails with a purple screen error (1006796) | VMwar...

[ganeshgv]

Hi MMazzei,

Most of the time Purple Screen error on Esxi due to hardware faults. So can you please check whether any amber glows on "Dell PowerEdge R710" server.

Regards,

Ganesh GV

[MMazzei]

Here is a fresh log from a newly induced crash

Just trying to add a new datastore raised the purple screen (with the SAN online, when the SAN is not on the network there isn't any problem)

[MMazzei]

Nothing glows on either the host nor the SAN, and the vcsa has no alarms for the host either