One thing you'll never see mentioned in a VMware Knowedgebase article is the term PSOD. Those ominous letters harken back to the blue screen crashes we all have seen on Windows based computers. In VMware, our dump screens have a magenta (purple) background, and so the lingo goes:

BSOD = Blue Screen Of Death
PSOD = Purple Screen Of Death

We really hate the negative connotations that these short-forms impart and much prefer to refer to these as purple diagnostics screens, because they do contain a great deal of information you can use to help diagnose the problem you have encountered. Here's what one looks like:

(click to enlarge)

Here is a list of every KB article we have that talks about these diagnostic screens. Hopefully a list you never need.

• A VMware ESX 4.x host becomes unresponsive and displays a purple diagnostic screen after changing the value of netPktHeapMinSize
• Adding USB Keyboard/Mouse to KVM may trigger a purple diagnostics screen
• An ESX/ESXi 4.1 U2 host with vShield Endpoint 1.0 installed fails with a purple diagnostic screen mentioning VFileFilterReconnectWork
• An ESXi host fails to boot with the purple diagnostic screen error: Two filesystems with the same UUID have been detected
• An ESXi host halts and displays a purple diagnostic screen when using Network I/O Control with a Network Adapter that does not support VLAN Offload
• An ESXi host stops responding and displays a purple diagnostic screen after installing Trend Micro Deep Security
• Changing MTU under heavy traffic causes the ESXi host to display the purple diagnostic screen
• Collecting diagnostic information from an ESX or ESXi host that experiences a purple diagnostic screen
• Configuring an ESX/ESXi 3.0-4.1 host to capture a VMkernel coredump from a purple diagnostic screen to a diagnostic partition
• Configuring an ESX/ESXi host to capture a VMkernel coredump from a purple diagnostic screen
• Configuring an ESXi 5.0 host to capture a VMkernel coredump from a purple diagnostic screen to a diagnostic partition
• Configuring an ESXi 5.0 host to capture a VMkernel coredump from a purple diagnostic screen via the Network Dump Collector
• Connection to the switch module is lost for all systems in a blade server configuration when one system hits a purple error screen
• Decoding Machine Check Exception (MCE) output after a purple screen error
• ESX 3.0 encounters an exception type 0 purple diagnostic screen
• ESX 3.5 host becomes unresponsive with the purple screen error: deltadisk+0x4baa stack
• ESX 4 may generate a purple diagnostics screen or kernel panic after an upgrade due to an insufficient disk space
• ESX build upgrade causes system fault and purple screen.
• ESX host fails to boot or experiences a purple screen error after power outage
• ESX host fails with a purple screen error after upgrading to Dell Open Manager 5.5
• ESX host fails with Lost Heartbeat purple diagnostic screen mentioning VmkDev: 3102: Can't find serial#
• ESX host purple screen with error: NOT_IMPLEMENTED bora/vmernel/main/lpage.c:3275
• ESX host reboots, becomes unresponsive, or experiences a purple diagnostic screen when logging into the service console
• ESX host shows a purple diagnostic screen and the error: Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000004
• ESX host stops responding and displays a purple diagnostic screen
• ESX host stops responding and displays a purple screen error after a storage rescan
• ESX host with Adaptec controller fails with a purple diagnostic screen when restoring from a tape
• ESX Server 3.0.1, Patch ESX-1005118: ESX Server Might Fail with a Purple Screen When a Target Reset Is Issued During Heavy I/O Conditions
• ESX Server 3.0.2, Patch ESX-1005119: ESX Server Might Fail with a Purple Screen When a Target Reset Is Issued During Heavy I/O Conditions
• ESX/ESXi 4.0 experiences a purple diagnostic screen in a VMM world mentioning "no heartbeat" or "Failed to ack TLB invalidate"
• ESX/ESXi 4.0 Update 1, 4.0 Update 2 and 4.1 fail with a purple diagnostic screen on AMD Opteron 6100-series processor based systems
• ESX/ESXi 4.1 and 5.0 host fails with a purple diagnostic screen: #PF Exception 14 in a helper world mentioning timerq_RB_REMOVE_COLOR
• ESX/ESXi 4.1 host fails with a purple diagnostic screen when removing an uplink network interface from a vSwitch configured for Beacon Probing
• ESX/ESXi 4.1 host fails with a purple diagnostic screen: #PF Exception 14 mentioning DVFilterSocketAcceptTcpip and vmk_accept
• ESX/ESXi 4.1 with network card NC522SFP fails to install or upgrade with a purple diagnostic screen
• ESX/ESXi 4.x displays a purple diagnostic screen during shutdown: PANIC bora/vmkernel/main/dlmalloc.c:4758
• ESX/ESXi 4.x host fails with a purple diagnostic screen when VMFS snapshot volumes are exposed to multiple hosts in a vCenter Server cluster
• ESX/ESXi 4.x host with EMC PowerPath experiences a purple diagnostic screen mentioning MpxIodone
• ESX/ESXi hosts fail with a purple diagnostic screen and report the error: #PF Exception(14)
• ESXi 4.0 hosts may experience a purple screen after vCenter Server is upgraded to 5.0
• ESXi 4.1 hosts that use HP CRU driver fail with a purple diagnostic screen when ECC events occur
• ESXi host running QLogic 841.k1.34.1-1vmw driver fails with a purple diagnostic screen
• ESXi hosts experience intermittent lockups and purple screen errors after upgrading to ESXi 3.5 Update 4
• Extracting the log file after an ESX or ESXi host fails with a purple screen error
• Fujitsu RX300 S5 fails with a purple diagnostic screen with "no symbols" on VMware ESX/ESXi 4.1
• IBM BladeCenter HS22 ESX and ESXi hosts display a purple diagnostic screen indicating Hardware (Machine) Error after upgrading the uEFI BIOS from 1.09
• Interpreting an ESX/ESXi host purple diagnostic screen
• Purple screen error during Fiber Channel Changes
• Rescanning after adding or removing LUNs generates a purple diagnostic screen with message: qla4xxx: mappings out of sync – stopping