VM unresponsiveness and 100% CPU usage during Veeam backup in ESXi 8.0

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

   VM CPU usage climbs to 100% and remains at maximum.
   Guest OS becomes unresponsive and requires a hard power off.
   Issue occurs during scheduled Veeam backup windows.
   The `VSCSISharedVdMainWorld` kernel thread shows excessive consumption in `esxtop`.

Environment

VMware ESXi 8.x

Cause

An efficiency issue in the `VSCSISharedVdMainWorld` kernel world causes thread saturation when managing shared storage paths for clustered VMDKs or heavy I/O loads.

The thread can enter a state of continuous high utilization, impacting overall host performance and potentially leading to cluster validation failures or host instability.

Resolution

This issue is resolved in VMware ESXi 8.0 Update 3h and higher. 

See Download Broadcom products and software for steps to download this release.

 

Additional Information

Japanese version of this KB : https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/431121