ESXi PSOD due to GP Exception 13 in world with Intel 13th Generation CPU

If you are using an Intel 13th Generation (Raptor Lake) CPU and you have not disabled either the E-Cores or P-Cores, you may run into a PSOD when powering on a VM with the following exception:

GP Exception 13 in world

Since ESXi does not support Intel's hybrid consumer CPU architecture, Option 1 below is the current recommended approach that provides the best customer experience as ESXi will see one consistent set of cores, ideally the Performance Cores (P-Cores), as they include Hyper-threading (HT). If you can not or prefer not to disable the E-Cores or P-Cores, then Option 2 can be used with two additional workarounds.

Option 1 (Recommended) -

• Disable Efficiency Cores (E-Cores) within system BIOS

Option 2 -

• Add ESXi kernel boot option to disable the CPU uniformity check, please see this video HERE for the detailed instructions

• To workaround the PSOD mentioned in this blog post, you will need add the additional ESXi kernel setting after installing ESXi which ignores the MSR Faults and prevents the PSOD from happening by running the following:

esxcli system settings kernel set -s ignoreMsrFaults -v TRUE