Guest VM crashing with High Virtual machine CPU usage alert
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Guest VM crashing with High Virtual machine CPU usage alert

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Article ID: 373456

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Updated On: 04-29-2025

Products

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

  • Customers face issues with the guest OS is crashing on VMs running Windows Server 2022. Randomly the guest VMs are crashing with High VM CPU.
  • The hardware is not reporting any errors and there is enough capacity on hosts. This issue is specifically related to ESXi hosts running on AMD CPU architecture.
  • The issue is seen on infrastructures running on ESXi version prior to VMware ESXi 8.0 Update 2b.
  • In the guest OS memory dump we see the following:

   // bugcheck code
   0: kd> !analyze -show
   SECURE_KERNEL_ERROR (18b)
   The secure kernel has encountered a fatal error.
   Arguments:
   Arg1: 000000000000018c  // Hyperguard violation
   Arg2: 000000000000100b  // A processor mode misconfiguration
   Arg3: 0000000000000000
   Arg4: 000000000000409b

 

Environment

VMware ESXi 8.0 Update 2a and earlier.

Resolution

Additional Information