Best Practices When Deploying VMware vSphere on the HP ProLiant DL980 (updated October 2012)

Figure 9: Disabling the usePCC Boot Flag

Installing HP NMI driver for VMware ESXi 5.0

VMware introduced the ability to register for non-maskable interrupt (NMI) events in the ESX/ESXi 4.1 kernel. As a result,

HP is providing an NMI driver (hpnmi) that works with the ESXi 5.0 kernel to log NMI information to the HP Integrated

Management Log (IML).

If you have installed the HP NMI driver, ESXi automatically halts the server when an NMI occurs and displays a purple

screen of death (PSOD), along with the following message:

Panic requested by 3rd party NMI handlers

If the driver is not installed however, ESXi logs the event and may allow the system to continue operating even after a

hardware error is reported. Therefore, HP highly recommended you install this driver. You can install this driver using

the esxcli utility in conjunction with offline bundles, or you can install it with a depot. This paper presents the offline

bundles + utility method only.

Installing offline bundles on an ESXi 5.x host using the vSphere CLI 5.x esxcli utility

Before you can update or patch an ESXi 5.0x host from the command line, you must have access to a machine on which

to run the VMware vSphere Command-Line Interface 5.0 (vSphere CLI). You can install the vSphere CLI on your Microsoft

Windows or Linux system. For more information about importing or installing the vSphere CLI 5.x, see the vSphere

Command-Line Interface Installation and Reference Guide at

vmware.com/support/pubs.