We recently purchased several B200-M3 blades with E5-2680v2 processors. Our UCS infrastructure and blade firmware is at 2.2(1d). ESXi hosts are at 5.5u1.
From my reading of the Release Notes, this makes the new blades vulnerable to Caveat CSCuo30572 which is a bug in the v2 processors that can cause Windows 2008R2 guests to blue screen.
VMware KB2073791 also deals with this bug
The Intel Erratum is C135
Updating the firmware (2.2(1d) probably to fixed version 2.2(3d)) is a relatively long process in our environment.
Has anyone experienced this bug? Do the guests blue screen at any particular time; e.g. when booting? Are Windows 2012 guests impacted? One of our new v2 blades was running Windows 2008R2 guests for about a week without any known problem. It has since been taken out of production.
The Release Notes (2.2) description for CSCuo30572 is: "Intel v2 processors no longer cause PSOD with Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 VM guests." Should the PSOD (ESXi crash) actually be BSOD (Microsoft crash)? Or can ESXi purple screens be caused also, crashing the entire host?
The Release Notes also indicate that the Caveat is resolved in release 2.2(2c)A. Does the A indicate that an Infrastructure update is all that is needed? That does not seem like it would supply the fixed microcode to the processors via BIOS.
I'm basically looking for some insight before proceeding with another FW update. Thank you.
