ESXi purple screen of death with errors E1000PollRxRing and E1000DevRx

Everyone loves the purple screen of death right?

This is a nasty problem that I ran into… It happens with Windows virtual machines using the E1000 adapter and is a known issue. Since this is a known issue from the 5.0 days I doubt vmware is going to resolve it.  The only fix is to replace the E1000 adapters with VMXNET3 adapters.   You really should be using VMXNET3 adapters anyways but replacing these requires downtime.   It’s a pain.   You can read the official vmware article here:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2059053