HP Proliant 360 G8: ESXi 5.5 falls into debug screen on reboot

[a__v]

Hello everybody,

Here's our setup: we now have two fresh identical HP ProLiant 360 G8, extra RAM and extra NIC installed (all the additional hardware is HP-originated and officially compatible with our server model of course).

I have consequently updated Intelligent provisioning (to ver. 1.50), updated firmware with SSP (ver. 09.2013), and installed ESXi 5.5 from HP-customized ISO (ver. 5.71.3-Sep2013) using Intellegent Provisioning, in identical manner.

The problem is that one of the servers reboots without any issues, and the other one falls into purple debug screen and hangs. 

The ESXi debug log is attached (sorry it's a screenshot), to me it seems like during the shutdown process physical processor PCPU0 shuts down drivers and stops having a heartbeat, and other PCPUs raise NMI errors and halt the system.

According to ESXi KB it could be caused by a hardware failure or firmware issue, but on the troblemaking server HP diagnostics (system information in iLO) show no errors, everything is green OKs, all the processors and RAM modules are present. The processors are two Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2430 0 @ 2.20GHz (don't think it matters, but just in case).

My first intention was simply try to reinstall the ESXi, does it sound reasonable?

And if not - what troubleshooting steps would you recommend?

System ROM firmware is from january 2013, probably i need to update it to newer september-2013-version?

If any other specific information like part models is needed - please let me know. I'm confused and will appreciate some advice, thanks a lot in advance!

[a__v · Accepted solution]

So, updating BIOS didn't help.

Reinstallation of ESXi through Intelligent Provisioning didn't help.

And finally, a simple CD-boot-install (WITHOUT Intelligent Provisioning) did it, and ESXi is now running without issues. I'm still confused, but well, I got it working finally.

(By the way, Provisioning's firmware update from HP site doesn't work also, even ver.1.50., but that's another story.)