PSOD (purple screen of death) "MEM_ALLOC" "<no symbols>" after update to ESXi650-201811002 or ESXi650-201901001

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• PSOD (purple screen of death) after update to ESXi650-201811002 or ESXi650-201901001 during boot of systems with large memory capacity configurations as described below.

@BlueScreen: MEM_ALLOC bora/vmkernel/main/memmap.c:4048
Code start: VMK uptime: 0:00:01:12.356
xxxxxxxxxxx<no symbols>xxxxxxxxxx stack:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx<no symbols>xxxxxxxxxx stack:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx<no symbols>xxxxxxxxxx stack:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx<no symbols>xxxxxxxxxx stack:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx<no symbols>xxxxxxxxxx stack:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
....
xxxxxxxxxxx Panic: vPanicInt:447: vmtree:/build/mts/release/bora-11188412/bora
xxxxxxxxxxx vmkernel 0x0 .data 0x0 .bss 0x0
xxxxxxxxxxx Dump system not initialized.

• No core dump available.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5

Resolution

This issue is resolved in vSphere 6.5 U3 available via the customer portal.

• Only ESXi 650-201811002 and ESXi650-201901001 are affected.
• Large Memory Capacity considerations:
  •  Systems that have less than 1TB of memory per NUMA domain (and that the total number of NUMA domains in the system is less than 64) will not hit this issue
  •  It is possible because of the nature of the issue that some systems with more than 1TB of memory per NUMA domain will also not hit this issue
  •  While this PSOD is more likely to happen in systems with larger memory configurations, it is possible to have the same total memory capacity in a variety of systems and not PSOD in all cases because the issue is dependent on both memory capacity and how the system firmware breaks up the contiguous regions of memory

ESXi 6.7 is not affected.