Yes I am a victim of PSOD while using E1000 Network cards

[rrz2012]

Hi Guru's

This is a more learning why this would happen.

I received the PSOD as per below screenshot;

I know this could be resolved using this KB article VMware KB: VMware ESXi 5.x host experiences a purple diagnostic screen mentioning E1000PollRxRing an...

But all these days we have been using without an issue, why it would suddenly crop up and can any of the guru's out there help me understand why this would happen....

Thanks,

RRZ

[bayupw]

Hi

I had this issue in a customer and it was caused by a new VM (Windows 2008 if I'm not mistaken) and it was solved by disabling Receive Side Scaling (RSS) but it may impacted performance - see these links

VMware KB: Poor network performance or high network latency on Windows virtual machines

Re: E1000 virtual nic on Win 2003 R2 causing PSOD on ESXi 5.1 (PF Exception 14)

So it would be better to change the network adapter to VMXNET3.

But there is a patch to solve that fix this as per KB that you mentioned VMware KB: VMware ESXi 5.x host experiences a purple diagnostic screen mentioning E1000PollRxRing an...the customer has patched the ESXi and is no longer having this problem at the moment.

Have you updated your ESXi as per KB's resolution?

[rrz2012]

Thanks Bayu!

I know what you mean, but I would like to get into details as to why it happens just now.

We have been living with E1000 cards all these years ... right? why now?

[rrz2012]

I have checked this a bit more thoroughly, the difference between E1000 and VMXNet3 Cards are that VMXNet3 is an implementation of paravirtualized driver. Hence it handles the I/O more efficiently.

The paravirtualization provides specially defined 'hooks' to allow the guest(s) and host to request and acknowledge these tasks, which would otherwise be executed in the virtual domain (where execution performance is worse). A successful paravirtualized platform may allow the virtual machine monitor(VMM) to be simpler (by relocating execution of critical tasks from the virtual domain to the host domain), and/or reduce the overall performance degradation of machine-execution inside the virtual-guest.

Above quote is from wikipedia.

[chrklee]

The following KB article describes the problem and the builds that include the fix for the PSOD: VMware KB: VMware ESXi 5.x host experiences a purple diagnostic screen mentioning E1000PollRxRing an...

Thanks,

Christoph

[rcporto]

The problem may appear only now because the network traffic may increased in the last days/weeks, maybe due new backup jobs and new VM deployed.