Tag Archives: powercli

Wrong iovDisableIR setting on ProLiant Gen8 might cause a PSOD

This posting is ~6 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.

TL;DR: There’s a script at the bottom of the page that fixes the issue.

Some days ago, this HPE customer advisory caught my attention:

Advisory: (Revision) VMware – HPE ProLiant Gen8 Servers running VMware ESXi 5.5 Patch 10, VMware ESXi 6.0 Patch 4, Or VMware ESXi 6.5 May Experience Purple Screen Of Death (PSOD): LINT1 Motherboard Interrupt

And there is also a corrosponding VMware KB article:

ESXi host fails with intermittent NMI PSOD on HP ProLiant Gen8 servers

It isn’t clear WHY this setting was changed, but in VMware ESXi 5.5 patch 10, 6.0  patch 4, 6.0 U3 and, 6.5 the Intel IOMMU’s interrupt remapper functionality was disabled. So if you are running these ESXi versions on a HPE ProLiant Gen8, you might want to check if you are affected.

To make it clear again, only HPE ProLiant Gen8 models are affected. No newer (Gen9) or older (G6, G7) models.

Currently there is no resolution, only a workaround. The iovDisableIR setting must set to FALSE. If it’s set to TRUE, the Intel IOMMU’s interrupt remapper functionality is disabled.

To check this setting, you have to SSH to each host, and use esxcli  to check the current setting:

[[email protected]:~] esxcli system settings kernel list -o iovDisableIR

Name          Type  Description                                 Configured  Runtime  Default
------------  ----  ---------------------------------------     ----------  -------  -------
iovDisableIR  Bool  Disable Interrupt Routing in the IOMMU...   FALSE       FALSE    TRUE

I have written a small PowerCLI script that uses the Get-EsxCli cmdlet to check all hosts in a cluster. The script only checks the setting, it doesn’t change the iovDisableIR setting.

Here’s another script, that analyzes and fixes the issue.

Creating console screenshots with Get-ScreenshotFromVM.ps1

This posting is ~6 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.

Today, I had a very interesting discussion. As part of an ongoing troubleshooting process, console screenshots of virtual machines should be created.

The colleagues, who were working on the problem, already found a PowerCLI script that was able to create screenshots using the Managed Object Reference (MoRef). But unfortunately all they got were black screens and/ or login prompts. Latter were the reason why they were unable to run the script unattended. They used the Get-VMScreenshot script, which was written by Martin Pugh.

I had some time to take a look at his script and I created my own script, which is based on his idea and some parts of his code.

This file is also available on GitHub.

One important note: If you want to take console screenshots of VMs, please make sure that display power saving settings are disabled! Windows VMs are showing a black screen after some minutes. Please disable this using the energy options, or better using a GPO. Otherwise you will capture a black screen!