ESX and ESXi installations on HP systems require the HP NMI driver

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Hardware faults are indicated by non-maskable interrupts (NMIs). To ensure proper handling of NMIs, ESX/ESXi 4.1 and ESXi 5.x instances on HP systems require the HP NMI driver. The NMI driver ensures that NMIs are properly detected and logged. Without this driver, HP systems with ESX or ESXi ignore NMIs by default.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
VMware ESX 4.1.x
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5

Resolution

Ensure that you have the latest HP NMI driver installed. You may want to contact HP to confirm whether or not you have latest driver installed.

If you do not have the NMI driver, you can alter the default behavior to ensure that the HP system sends panic messages when an NMI is received. See the VMware Knowledge Base article Using hardware NMI facilities to troubleshoot unresponsive hosts (1014767).

Note: If you change the default behavior to panic or if you do not have the NMI driver, no diagnostic logging occurs in the ILO.