VMware VM startup EFI crash after update to ESXi 7.0 Update 3n (Solved)

[gdwnldsksc]

Placement/ordering of SATA devices was causing this for some reason. Moving them around resolved it.

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This is only happening on my VMS VMs, all Windows/Linux/Solaris/ArcaOS/BSD VMs are unaffected.

I upgraded my VM host to 7u3n - before this it was not occurring. Host was 7u3f or 7u3i before update was performed using esxcli from an SSH session via VMware's online repository.

If I select " During the next boot, force entry into the EFI setup screen" it will boot.

This is both on a VM where a new install was done post-upgrade, and an existing install from pre-upgrade.

Relevant vmware.log entry:

Code: Select all

2023-09-10T01:26:24.280Z In(05) vcpu-0 - Guest: About to do EFI boot: EFI VMware Virtual SATA Hard Drive (1.0)
2023-09-10T01:26:24.289Z In(05) vcpu-0 - Msg_Post: Error
2023-09-10T01:26:24.289Z In(05) vcpu-0 - [msg.efi.exception] The firmware encountered an unexpected exception. The virtual machine cannot boot.
2023-09-10T01:26:24.289Z In(05) vcpu-0 - ----------------------------------------
2023-09-10T01:26:24.290Z In(05) vcpu-0 - VigorTransportProcessClientPayload: opID=lmcrv7jf-567-auto-fs-h5:70000134-b6-01-01-58-b2d3 seq=2083: Receiving Bootstrap.MessageReply request.
2023-09-10T01:26:24.290Z In(05) vcpu-0 lmcrv7jf-567-auto-fs-h5:70000134-b6-01-01-58-b2d3 VigorTransport_ServerSendResponse opID=lmcrv7jf-567-auto-fs-h5:70000134-b6-01-01-58-b2d3 seq=2083: Completed Bootstrap request.
2023-09-10T01:26:24.290Z In(05) vmx - Stopping VCPU threads...

Note: I'm in the process of upgrading the environment to 8, which will probably resolve this, so may not be able to test further. But pre-update, this worked just fine.