While you can certainly use this method, you will want to follow-up and manually install the appropriate driver VIBs from HPE. 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. Solution 1: Use VMware’s Standard ISO Media 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. Note: All these workaround require a fresh install of ESXi. 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. Yes, there are more than one driver with issues. The Issue: There are incompatible driver(s) in the customized ISO from HPE. The Error: “ PF Exception 14 in world 67667:sfcb-smx IP 0x0 addr 0x0″ 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. In fact, vSphere 6.5 is supposedly the last version that will support the G7s. HPE G7 Server support is being dropped by both HPE and VMware.
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.īest practice is to use the vendor’s custom ISO’s that have the hardware drivers integrated, so I used HPE’s latest Custom ISO.