VMware ESXi Purple Screen of Death (PSOD) on Dell Server

Last week I was informed of a customer who had a Purple Screen of Death on a Dell PowerEdge R810 running ESXi 4.1 Update 1. The stop screen showed the following reason:

LINT1 motherboard interrupt. This is a hardware problem: please contact your hardware vendor

After working with Dell tech support, the customer was directed to disable the C States and C1E settings in the BIOS. I was interested in this setting as I have a cluster using the same hardware with the same version of ESXi.

The following article describes C States and specifically the C1E setting; it is a method to reduce power consumption by powering off cores when not in use: http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/Impact+of+C1E+on+PowerEdge+11G+Servers+–+HPBD+100909.

The VMware Performance Best Practices Guide (available here: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere4.0.pdf) specifically states on page 15 to “Disable C1E halt state in the BIOS.”

I don’t spend a lot of time changing settings in the BIOS, but with the possible impact of this setting thought this was worth sharing.