I've been having this issue for many months on the past few latest versions of ESXi 703, currently 23794027. It's Ubuntu 20LTS flavors with livepatch kernels, so they're mostly up to date. I'd been curious if this was a livepatch issue, but see other people having the same problem on regular installs.
I'm having a similar number of VM's lock with this error:
A fault has occurred causing a virtual CPU to enter the shutdown state. If this fault had occurred outside of a virtual machine, it would have caused the physical machine to restart. The shutdown state can be reached by incorrectly configuring the virtual machine, a bug in the guest operating system, or a problem in VMware ESX.
Should note these are HPE servers with Epyc CPU's, and I've seen several posts by people having similar VM halt errors on Vmware Workstation with Epyc, and even suggestions of things to put in the vmx file related to CPU. It's making me wonder if ESXi 703 on Epyc has some bad config they need to correct.
Original Message:
Sent: Apr 13, 2023 05:01 PM
From: G0nz0UK
Subject: The CPU has been disabled by the guest operating system
Hello,
Today we have 4 VMs in 2 different clusters freeze do to the error in vCenter "The CPU has been disabled by the guest operating system"
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2000542
All 4 are on Ubuntu 20.0.4.6 and the hosts are on VMware ESXi, 7.0.3, 20328353.
The interesting part is all these 4 VMs do the same job too, but I'm am told nothing was scheduled to happen on these VMs at that time although I did see the CPU increase around the time of the freeze.
A reset fixed the issue and they were all ok after and nothing showed in the kernel logs.
I've asked them to update Ubuntu in case it's a bug as the other 300 VMs were ok.
What do you think it could have been?
Thanks