HPE Proliant G7 Servers and vSphere 6.5 Purple Screen of Death

Upgrading VMware to ESXi 6.5 on HP G7 Servers will crash and cause you to scream and will require you to waste your time building a custom ISO that HPE could have easily done.
Best practice is to use the vendor’s custom ISO’s that have the hardware drivers integrated, so I used HPE’s latest Custom ISO.

HPE G7 Server support is being dropped by both HPE and VMware. In fact, vSphere 6.5 is supposedly the last version that will support the G7s. Knowing this info, I assumed upgrading from ESXi 6.0 to 6.5 on G7 would work, but I found out quickly that after the upgrade the hosts would “Purple Screen of Death” (PSOD) right after boot.

The Error: “PF Exception 14 in world 67667:sfcb-smx IP 0x0 addr 0x0″

The Issue: There are incompatible driver(s) in the customized ISO from HPE. Yes, there are more than one driver with issues.

The Workarounds: There are various workarounds that I have personally found to work, while others have been resolutions I have read about after I dealt with this, so I was not able to verify that they do indeed work, but I will list them nevertheless. Upgrading the firmware, BIOS, etc did not resolve the issue.
Note: All these workaround require a fresh install of ESXi. Running an Upgrade does not remove the incompatible drivers, and the host doesn’t stay alive long enough before crashing to manually remove them via SSH.

Solution 1: Use VMware’s Standard ISO Media
While this goes against many best practices, VMware doesnt offer too many vendor drivers in their ISO builds, so the offending drivers do not get installed and crash the system. While you can certainly use this method, you will want to follow-up and manually install the appropriate driver VIBs from HPE.

Solution 2: Build your own Custom ISO
This takes a bit more work, but is probably the most comprehensive path to resolution. You will basically need to remove drivers from the HPE Customized 6.5 ISO and inject those from the 6.0 ISO. The following are instructions on doing this.

Create Custom VMware ESXi Media

Prerequisites:

Instructions:

  • Launch vSphere PowerCLI

  • Add the HP ESXi 6.5 image bundle
    Add-EsxSoftwareDepot -DepotUrl C:\ESXi\HPE-6_5.zip

  • Check the Profile
    Get-EsxImageProfile

  • Copy the Profile
    New-EsxImageProfile -CloneProfile HPE-ESXi-6.5.0-OS-Release-6* -Name “G7-ESXi”


    Use “HPE Custom” for Vendor

  • Check the Profile
    Get-EsxImageProfile

  • Remove the driver from the image
    Remove-EsxSoftwarePackage G7-ESXi hpe-smx-provider

  • Add the HP ESXi 6.0 image bundle
    Add-EsxSoftwareDepot -DepotUrl C:\ESXi\HPE-6_0.zip
  • Check the Profile
    Get-EsxImageProfile

  • View both drivers in the two bundles
    Get-EsxSoftwarePackage | findstr smx

  • Add the necessary driver into the custom build
    add-esxsoftwarepackage -imageprofile G7-ESXi -softwarepackage “hpe-smx-provider 600.03.11.00.9-2768847”

  • Convert your custom bundle to ISO
    Export-EsxImageProfile -ImageProfile G7-ESXi -ExportToIso -filepath “C:\ESXi\G7-ESXi.iso”

  • Now take that ISO file that was created and use it to do a FRESH INSTALL. (Remember, upgrade will not work).

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