Error: #PF Exception 14 in world fastslab PSOD on VMware ESXi 8.0

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

VMware ESXi 8.0 hosts, including version 8.0U3, may experience an unrecoverable purple diagnostic screen (PSOD) when performing high I/O operations, specifically during SESparse disk consolidation. This issue is triggered by a kernel memory allocation error.

• Backtrace contains:
  
  • FastSlabCreateObj
  • FastSlabReplenishCPU
  • FastSlabAllocSlow
  • FS3_SlabAlloc
  • FS3_MemAllocExt
  • Fil6_PlugFileHoleTxn
  • SafeMemAccess_Fault
  • Fil6_FileIOInt
  • Fil6_FileIOIntWithRetry
• vmkernel.log messages show WARNING: Heartbeat: PCPU ## didn't have a heartbeat followed by ALERT: NMI: NMI IPI.

Environment

• VMware ESXi 8.0
• SESparse Virtual Disks

Cause

This issue is caused by a software defect where the ESXi system incorrectly estimates the amount of temporary memory needed for a storage write. When performing large writes to new areas of a virtual disk (common during consolidation or replication), the system identifies more data blocks to process than it originally planned for. 

Resolution

There is currently no workaround available for this issue.

This is a known issue impacting VMware ESXi 8.0 and VMware Engineering is actively working on a fix. Please subscribe to this KB article to receive updates on the fix status and to be notified when a patch version is released.