Frequent VDI Session Freeze/Disconnects after upgrading ESXi to 7.0 Update 3 and NVIDIA GRID to 13.0

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

VDI Sessions freezing or disconnecting after upgrading to ESXI 7.0.3 and GPU Driver 13.0 resulting in a production outage.

The vmware.log may show messages similar to:

vmware.log:2021-10-21T16:40:26.559Z Er(02) vthread-2115115 - vmiop_log: (0x0): Timeout occurred, reset initiated.

vmware.log:2021-11-01T17:43:33.716Z Er(02) vthread-2165681 - vmiop_log: (0x0): Timeout occurred, reset initiated.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.3

Cause

Event delivery to applications might delay indefinitely due to a race condition in the VMKAPI driver. As a result, the virtual desktop infrastructure in some environments, such as systems using NVIDIA graphic cards, might become unresponsive or lose connection to the VDI client.

Resolution

Update to ESXi 7.0 U3c Build 19193900.

Workaround:
Roll back to the previous version of ESXi prior to this ocurring.