Verifying your hardware is functioning correctly

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Faulty hardware can cause ESXi hosts to fail. This may cause the host to experience the following behaviors:

• Unable to install on certified hardware
• Unable to upgrade on certified hardware
• Receive MCE errors in log files
• Errors such as: Failed to load vmkernel: 0xbad0013
• ESXi host fails repeatedly
• ESXi host stops responding
• vSAN unable to write to cache
• vSAN experiencing disk latency

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 9.x

Resolution

Run Hardware Diagnostic tests

Most servers are shipped with a hardware diagnostics CD, although other hardware vendors may choose to install a hidden utility partition located on the system.

 

Diagnose hardware related problems on the server by booting from the diagnostic CD or choosing Diagnostics from the boot device list.

 

These diagnostic tools allow:

• Check the hardware configuration to verify that it is functioning correctly
• Test individual hardware components
• Diagnose hardware-related problems
• Obtain a complete hardware configuration

Check memory

Note: This process requires downtime on the ESX/ESXi host. In most cases, contacting the hardware vendor for a diagnostic utility as mentioned above should be sufficient in testing the hardware.

There might be the following error:

The BIOS reports that NUMA node 1 has no memory. This problem is either caused by a bad BIOS or a very unbalanced distribution of memory modules.

NUMA is a system where each processor has separate memory. The separate memory helps to avoid a performance hit when several processors attempt to address the same memory.

 

The main requirement is that a similar amount of memory is installed beside each processor. If the amount of memory installed beside each processor is not similar, it is unbalanced and the system might experience performance problems.

For more information, see Using NUMA Systems with ESXi

Additional information on NUMA is also available in the Resource Management Guide.