Today I upgraded a customer to ESXi 6.5 Update 1, but unfortunately some of them ended up purple screening at reboot after they were updated.

Affected Servers so far

HPE BL460c Gen9

HPE DL360p Gen8 (Reported by anonymous user)

HPE DL380 Gen9 (Reported by Bernhard)

HPE DL380 Gen8 (Reported by Ralf)

HPE DL380p Gen9 (Reported by Victor)

PSOD Error

PSOD: #PF Exception 14 in world 68297:sfcb-intelcim IP 0x41801b704d8f addr 0x443919649c000

In short the customer was running ESXi 5.5, and I reinstalled the servers using HPE 6.5 Update 1 OEM Image found here: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=OEM-ESXI65U1-HPE&productId=614

I configured the servers and found that VMware Update Manager had 3 additional updates:

Oddly it still wanted to install Update 1. I had already updated some Gen8 servers, and they had no issue with me installing all updates, so I went ahead and installed all three updates. But in this case the server never came back online. Instead it kept giving a PSOD on boot:

After some investigation I found it to be caused by the Ixgben driver updates. It is a driver for Intel network adapters. This also corresponded with the PSOD coming from sfcb-intelcim.

Anyway I contacted HPE Support, and the supported just heard of a similar case, so he wanted some logs and promised to return to me asap.

HPE Support return a little later and told me that they do not have a record of the noted kernel exception, so I was probably among the first to experience the error, if not the first. Hooray I was the first!

Workaround

HPE Returned and stated that those two updates should just be excluded, since it is a driver delivered by intel, and it does not work with the HPE firmware.

You should also avoid the VMware 6.5 Update 1 in Update Manager. I guess it also contains a ixgben driver from intel.

To quickly return to a working installation without reinstalling. you can press Shift+R during startup to get back to a working configuration. Thank you to my college André Briand de Crévecoeur for bringing this to my attention. https://kb.vmware.com/kb/1033604