Our recent post entitled Windows bugchecks on VMware ESXi with Xeon E5-2670 CPUs has been getting a lot of attention lately. I wanted to post a few scripts that I've created to help get information back about our guests to help workaround the problem.
Long story short, if your guest has nested hypervisor support enabled then trying to force the use of software MMU virtualization will not work. The host will automatically use hardware MMU virtualization. If you're SSH'd into the host on which the guest is running you can run the following command to determine what MMU settings are currently being used by the guest:
/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/vm1 # grep "HV Settings" vmware.log
2014-03-31T17:34:58.409Z| vmx| I120: HV Settings: virtual exec = 'hardware'; virtual mmu = 'software'
I've also written a quick PowerCLI script to check the NestedHVEnabled property of a PowerCLI VM object and set the property on powered off machines. Both scripts are attached to this post as text files. Download them and rename them to .ps1 files. Change the YOUR_VCENTER_SERVER to the name or IP address of your vCenter Server and you should be able to run them in your PowerCLI environment.
In order to set the NestedHVEnabled parameter the guest MUST be powered off.
These scripts have only been tested in PowerCLI version 5.5 Release 1 build 1295336
I hope these scripts help some folks out there.
Enjoy,
Andy aka Flux.