Since a few days I got several customers complaining about unresponsive or blue screening VM’s (both Windows 2008 and 2012) on ESXi5.1 and 5.5 environments. Troubleshooting at the customer site pointed out that the vnetflt.sys driver was causing these issues. This driver is part of the vShield Endpoint components that are installed whenever you a) explicitly installed them or b) when you installed VMware Tools with the “Complete Setup”-option.
Following this VMware KB article is appears that there is a memory leak in the vShield Endpoint and consequently this resolution is described:
This is a known issue affecting VMware Tools 5.1 and can impact ESXi 5.1 and 5.5.This issue is resolved in:
- ESXi 5.5 Update 2, available at VMware Downloads. For more information, see the VMware ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Release Notes.
Currently, there is no resolution in VMware ESXi 5.1.To resolve this issue when you are using vShield Endpoint Protection in your virtual environment, uninstall and reinstall VMware Tools with the Custom or Complete setup option.
For ESXi 5.5 this is a easy solution but what about ESXi 5.1 environments that are dependent on the vShield Endpoint Components? (like environments running Trend Micro Deep Security or Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager)
There’s another VMware KB article which gives this as a resolution:
ESXi 5.5 Update 2, available at VMware Downloads. For more information, see the VMware ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Release Notes.
ESXi 5.1 Patch 04, available at VMware Download Patches. For more information, see VMware ESXi 5.1, Patch Release ESXi510-201404001 (2070666).
So be advised on these patches since it’s currently unclear to me why all these customers recently experienced these issues.
