Exchange 2016 on Windows Server 2012 BSoD

Solution 1:

Your storage system is failing or too slow to keep up. If IO has been stalled for too long, Exchange thinks that storage is dead and kills Wininit to force hard reset.

See https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff625233.aspx and scroll to the end. It's the same for 2013 and 2016.

In some cases, the entire storage stack may be affected by the hang, making it impossible to write failure events to the crimson channel or any other area of the Windows Event Log. ESE also monitors the crimson channel by verifying that the event log can be written to. If writing to the event log fails for a long period of time, MSExchangeRepl intentionally causes a bugcheck of Windows by terminating wininit.exe. When the operating system I/O is hung, the system is obviously unable to write any ESE events to the event log.

I have experienced it firsthand when using Windows Server Backup to backup Exchange. When backup begins, it will do consistency check on all databases in parallel. This caused Exchange to BSoD after a few minutes when storage dropped out.

First solution is to disable ATS heartbeat to storage array https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2113956

Text is too long to copy but TL;DR: Your storage array connection may be dropped under heavy IO when ATS heartbeat of 8 seconds times out, that will cause IO timeout in VM, causing Exchange to BSoD.

Secondary solution is to add storage controllers to VM and distribute database disks between controllers. In my case, single pvscsi controller would choke badly under 6 databases, but when disks (including OS disk etc) were distributed over 4 pvscsi controllers, issues disappeared. I don't have a reference for that, just personal experience on vSphere 5.5 U3.

Solution 2:

You can issue a command to disable the ESE forced reboot, the cause is well explained by Don's answer.

I did it lately for a customer with a single server with ESXi, as the IO was overkilling the Exchange. (its still killing it, as it take age to simply open a management console in example, but at least it doesn't reboot..)

Add-GlobalMonitoringOverride -Identity Exchange\ActiveDirectoryConnectivityConfigDCServerReboot -ItemType Responder -PropertyName Enabled -PropertyValue 0 -ApplyVersion '15.0.712.24'

In there you need to use the correct Exchange version.

See here for Exchange version; https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh135098(v=exchg.150).aspx

See here for further detail; http://www.tecfused.com/2014/11/exchange-2013-dag-bsod/