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Host Crash because of ESX Active Directory Authentication

2 min read #Active Directory #vSphere #4.1 #Administration

I was subscribed to this thread and received an update today that I must have missed previously, with an issue much more serious than the one that the thread was originally started with.

Previously, I posted an article to explain how to Integrate ESXi into Active Directory. After the integration logging onto a host with your domain credentials can cause the host to crash. The issue occurs when the user logging into the ESX host with their Active Directory credentials is a member of more than 30 Security Groups.

The issue has been confirmed with happening with the user being a member of as little as 23 security groups as well.

The ESX Host throws an error and reboots (PSOD) and reboots. The thread owner has a ticket open with VMware and according to the information there engineering are working on the issue.

Below are Screenshots taken from the thread

VMware ESX 4.1.0 purple screen of death with exception text, register dump and coredump to disk message

ESX console error output: Heartbeat ALERT PCPU 0 didn’t have a heartbeat and NMI warning

I ran a quick check to how many groups my AD account is a member of (Powershell of course)

Get-QADUser msaidelk | Get-QADMemberOf -ErrorAction Continue | where {$_.GroupType -eq "Security" } | Measure-Object | Select-Object -Property Count | Format-List

Count : 45

I have tried to re-create this on my standalone host but have not experienced this problem.

Has anyone else encountered this issue?