“LINT1 motherboard interrupt” error while installing VMware ESXi
I got 3 Dell R730 servers on which VMware ESXi 7.0 U3 should be installed normally. During the installation I encountered the following error message:
Well, we all know how it feels when we see PSOD so a Purple Screen of Death – pretty much panic. But since we are experienced VMware administrators, we look at any PSODs soberly and go into troubleshooting. 😉
As described in the title of this post and also seen in the screenshot, the error message is:
LINT1 motherboard nonmaskable interrupt, undiagnosed. This may be a hardware problem: please contact your hardware vendor.
So I first went on the Internet to search for the error message, of course there were plenty about it. But first I found this official Knowledge Base article from VMware via the Dell Support page:
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1804
However, this KB article was not really target-leading so then I thought maybe the iDRAC would say something about my PSOD problem and here we go, there was a fatal error with the PCI card in slot 5:
This was a Broadcom 2 port 10GbE network adapter which was not supported on VMware vSphere 7. When I removed the NIC and restarted the VMware ESXi installation, the installation process went through flawlessly. So remember – even in a HomeLab – always use supported hardware and use the VMware HCL to check supported hardware.
That’s it from this post, if you have any questions please use the comments section below. 🙂