VMware appliance may fail to boot

Products

• VMware

Issue/Introduction

Release NSX Defender On-Premises 9.2, as well as Hosted 2020-2 for Sensors, updates the OS kernel to version 4.15. When running the appliance in a VMware virtual machine, you may experience a kernel boot lockup under the following conditions:

• In the VM settings, hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE (this is not the default)
• VMware version 6.5 or 5.5 on Intel Xeon CPU E5-2620 v2/v4

Testing with VMware ESXi-6.7.0 build 15160138 on Intel Xeon CPU E5-2430, we have not encountered this issue even if the setting hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE is present.

Before you upgrade your appliances to On-Premises 9.2, we recommend that VMware users do one of the following:

• Ensure the setting hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE is not present. If it is present set it to TRUE
• If hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE is required, ensure you are running VMware ESXi-6.7.0 build 15160138 or later

Upon reboot, if the appliance blocks showing the message: x86: Booting SMP configuration: on its console, the appliance can be recovered with the following steps

1. Reset the appliance. Enter the runtime GRUB (bootloader) configuration, and add the “nosmp” kernel parameter. The appliance will boot normally, but with only one virtual CPU available.
2. Once the appliance has booted, edit the file /etc/default/intel-microcode and change the line
   #IUCODE_TOOL_INITRAMFS=auto
   to
   IUCODE_TOOL_INITRAMFS=no
3. Run sudo update-initramfs -k all -u
4. Reboot normally