Microsoft fastened a identified concern inflicting blue screens and boot failures in Home windows Server 2022 digital machines (VMs) deployed on VMware ESXi hosts.
Home windows admins first reported experiencing VM begin points [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] after deploying final month’s KB5031364 cumulative replace.
The corporate confirmed the difficulty days later, saying it solely impacts visitor VMs on VMware ESXi hosts with an AMD Epyc bodily processor, the “Expose IOMMU to visitor OS” VMware choice toggled on, and Virtualization Primarily based Safety and System Guard Safe Launch enabled in Home windows Server 2022.
As Microsoft revealed throughout this month’s Patch Tuesday, the foundation trigger has now been addressed with the discharge of the KB5032198 Home windows Server 2022 cumulative replace.
“This replace addresses a identified concern that impacts digital machines (VMs) that run on VMware ESXi hosts,” Redmond mentioned.
“Home windows Server 2022 would possibly fail to start out up. The affected VMs will obtain an error with a blue display and a cease code: PNP DETECTED FATAL ERROR.”
Short-term workarounds additionally out there
Home windows directors unable to instantly set up the November 2023 Patch Tuesday updates even have short-term options to bypass this identified concern.
One strategy entails toggling off “Expose IOMMU to visitor OS” within the affected digital machines’ settings. But, this workaround is perhaps viable for a restricted set of techniques solely, as particular environments require this selection to be enabled by default.
Alternatively, as a final resort, uninstalling the problematic KB5031364 replace can deal with the VM boot issues with a major draw back: this may also take away all safety patches deployed with the replace.
In January and December 2022, Microsoft launched out-of-band Home windows Server updates to resolve points blocking Hyper-V VMs from booting and inflicting issues when creating new VMs on particular hosts.
Earlier this yr, Microsoft acknowledged the same concern impacting VMware ESXi VMs with Safe Boot enabled after the set up of February 2023 cumulative updates.
Subsequently, VMware promptly launched emergency updates for vSphere ESXi to handle the underlying trigger behind the VMs’ incapacity to find a bootable working system.