• After upgrading to ESXi 6.5, the host experiences a PSOD.
• The ESXi host is using a 10GB NIC.
• You see a backtrace similar to:
  
  2017-09-16T15:34:30.908Z cpu6:65645)@BlueScreen: #PF Exception 14 in world 65645:HELPER_UPLIN IP 0x41802c496258 addr 0x0
  PTEs:0x292379a027;0x2efe54c027;0xbfffffffff001;
  2017-09-16T15:34:30.908Z cpu6:65645)Code start: 0x41802c200000 VMK uptime: 4:02:26:10.151
  2017-09-16T15:34:30.908Z cpu6:65645)0x4390c369bd00:[0x41802c496258]UplinkTreePackQueueFilters@vmkernel#nover+0x188 stack: 0xe15427000
  2017-09-16T15:34:30.909Z cpu6:65645)0x4390c369bd90:[0x41802c49e142]UplinkLB_LoadBalanceCB@vmkernel#nover+0x1e42 stack: 0x1
  2017-09-16T15:34:30.909Z cpu6:65645)0x4390c369bf20:[0x41802c4916f2]UplinkAsyncProcessCallsHelperCB@vmkernel#nover+0x116 stack: 0x43048761eac0
  2017-09-16T15:34:30.910Z cpu6:65645)0x4390c369bf50:[0x41802c2c9e0d]helpFunc@vmkernel#nover+0x3c5 stack: 0x4300b9b2a050
  2017-09-16T15:34:30.910Z cpu6:65645)0x4390c369bfe0:[0x41802c4c91b5]CpuSched_StartWorld@vmkernel#nover+0x99 stack: 0x0
  2017-09-16T15:34:30.913Z cpu6:65645)base fs=0x0 gs=0x418041800000 Kgs=0x0
  
  Note: The preceding log excerpts are only examples. Date, time, and environmental variables may vary depending on your environment.

This issue occurs because the Netqueue commit phase abruptly stops due to a failure of hardware activation of a Rx queue. As a result, the Internal data structure of the Netqueue layer's could go out of sync causing a host PSOD.

This issue is resolved in VMware ESXi 6.5 P02 (ESXi-6.5.0-20171204001-standard), available at VMware Downloads. For more information, see KB 2151112

To workaround this issue if you do not want to upgrade, perform one of these options:

• Downgrade ESXi to 6.0 U2. For more information, see Reverting to a previous version of ESXi (1033604).
• Disable NetQueue on the affected ESXi host. For more information, see the Disable NetQueue on a Host section of the vSphere Networking guide.
  
  Caution: Disabling NetQueue can cause performance issues with network IO intensive virtual machines.