This issue occurs because some Linux operating systems, by default, enable support for Non Maskable Interrupt (NMI). It is a hardware dependent watchdog service which monitors the system hardware for failures. NMIs are generated periodically by system hardware to report the status to the NMI watchdog service. If the Linux kernel handler does not detect a certain NMI count in a specific period of time, it decides that the system has failed. This technology is similar to VMware Tools heartbeats for Virtual Machine monitoring in HA, except NMI runs at the kernel level whereas VMware Tools heartbeats run inside a guest operating system process.
Not all hardware support NMI. This issue is seen to occur with the latest virtual machine hardware version 8 and has been reproduced with version 7 also.
vCPUs presented to the guest operating system cannot have NMI enabled on them because they are abstracted representations of the host's physical CPU cores.