Bug: Purple Screen of Death caused by E1000 adapters and RSS (Receive Side Scaling)

If you are using E1000 adapters in your virtual machines, you should take a look at KB 2059053.

If the operating system is using RSS (Receive Side Scaling, practically all operating systems since Vista are using it) it is possible that your ESXi 5.0/5.1/5.5 host will die with a PSOD (Purple Screen of Death) with errors containing E1000PollRxRing and E1000DevRx.

PSOD

Resolution:

Update 30.01.2014 for ESX 5.1: A patch is available: see KB2062300 for more information / Patch from KB 2062300 is included in ESXi 5.1 Update 2

Update 24.11.2015 for ESX 5.5: Issue is fixed in VMware ESXi 5.5, Patch Release ESXi550-201410001 (2087358) For more information, see VMware ESXi 5.5, Patch Release ESXi550-201410001 (2087358). 

 

Workaround: workaround is to use the VMXNET3 adapters instead of the E1000.

The other possibility would be to disable RSS within the windows virtual machine – but I would prefer the change to the VMXNET3…

If you really want to disable RSS in your Win2008 (or newer) Server operating System you can use this command:

netsh int tcp set global rss=disabled

 

4 Comments

  1. Lewis

    Also autotunning being set on your NIC (within Windows) can cause this error. Fix with this command:

    netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

  2. cesar van hoebeecke

    is there still no patch available in this case? we have the issue too but cant find any further info concerning it. because of a but with other patch levels for our SAP environment we also can’t upgrade at the moment…

  3. Andreas Lesslhumer

    @Cesar van Hoebeecke: there is a patch available for 5.5 since September – I have updated the blog post.

  4. Arthur

    Thanks

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