Guest OS within a VM abruptly restarts with the event: A fault has occurred causing a virtual CPU to enter the shutdown state

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

The Guest OS within a VM abruptly reboots with the below symptoms:

• The Virtual Machine reports the following event in the vSphere Client,
  
  A fault has occurred causing a virtual CPU to enter the shutdown state. If this fault had occurred outside of a virtual machine, it would have caused the physical machine to restart. The shutdown state can be reached by incorrectly configuring the virtual machine, a bug in the guest operating system, or a problem in VM
  
  
• Windows Guest OS will report event ID 41: The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first
• The VMs vmware.log shows the following events:
  
  YYYY-MM-DDT00:00:00.000Z In(05) vcpu-18 - Triple fault.
  YYYY-MM-DDT00:00:00.000Z  In(05) vcpu-18 - MsgHint: msg.monitorEvent.tripleFault
  YYYY-MM-DDT00:00:00.000Z  In(05)+ vcpu-18 - A fault has occurred causing a virtual CPU to enter the shutdown state. If this fault had occurred outside of a virtual machine, it would have caused the physical machine to restart. The shutdown state can be reached by incorrectly configuring the virtual machine, a bug in the guest operating system, or a problem in VMware ESX.---------------------------------------
  YYYY-MM-DDT00:00:00.000ZIn(05) vcpu-0 - CPU reset: hard (mode HV)
  YYYY-MM-DDT00:00:00.000Z  In(05) vcpu-0 - Chipset: The guest has requested that the virtual machine be hard reset.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi

Cause

This issue can occur if

• The virtual machine is configured incorrectly.
• There is a bug within the Guest OS that caused the triple fault.
• The vmdk has an invalid adapterType configured. For eg. pvscsi controller with a vmdk that contains the buslogic adapterType

Resolution

To resolve the issue,

• Review the SCSI controller type that is configured on the VM using the command,
  
  grep scsi vm-name.vmx | grep virtualDev
  
  For eg.
  [root@hostname:/vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-folder/] grep scsi vm-name.vmx | grep virtualDev
scsi0.virtualDev = "pvscsi"
  
  
• Review the adapterType configured on the vmdk descriptor files that use the above scsi controller using the below command.
  
  grep ddb.adapterType vm-name.vmdk

For eg.
[root@hostname:/vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-folder/] grep ddb.adapterType vm-name.vmdk
ddb.adapterType = "buslogic"
  
  
• Use the below table to identify the correct ddb.adapterType for the SCSI adapter.
  
  

  Controller Type	Adapter Type
  BusLogic	buslogic
  LSI Logic	lsilogic
  LSI Logic SAS	lsilogic
  PVSCSI	lsilogic

• Shutdown the VM, backup the VMDK descriptor file and update the ddb.adapterType.
  
  For eg.
  
  • Power off the VM
  • Backup the vmdk descriptor file.
    [root@hostname:/vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-folder/] cp vm-name.vmdk vm-name.vmdk.bak
    
    
  • Edit the vmdk descriptor file
    [root@hostname:/vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-folder/] vi vm-name.vmdk
    
    
  • Update from ddb.adapterType = "buslogic" to ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic" and save the file.
    
    
  • Power on the VM

Additional Information

If a VM does not boot up reporting the same error, see
Powering on a virtual machine fails with the error: A fault has occurred causing a virtual CPU to enter the shutdown state

Troubleshooting Windows Event ID 41