VMware ESXi 5.1 has an interesting problem with the Purple (pink) screen of death (PSOD) when doing a warm boot. After entering maintenance mode of the host in question and initiating a reboot from vSphere client, the host will fail during shut-down process and show you a purple screen with the exception 14. This problem has been officially acknowledged by VMware since December 13th 2012 and the root cause for this problem is Beacon Probing, if enabled on ANY vSwitch in the host in question. The official resolution is to either disable beacon probing, and switch to using Link Status Only, or wait for an official update by VMware.
To change Beacon Probing to Link Status only, select the Networking page within Configuration of a host. Open the properties of the vSwitch and select the vSwitch. Click on Edit located at the bottom of the vSwitch properties and open the NIC Teaming tab. From here you can select the default option for this vSwitch, and thus change the Network Failover Detection from Beacon Probing to Link status only. Note that it is possible to select specific settings for each of the sub-elements, so do check those as well. If they are greyed out, the default setting will be selected.
Source: VMware KB 2038281
Hey Antti, I just came across your blog article. We actually have this KB implemented in Runecast Analyzer ( runecast.biz ), so admins can detect if their configuration is affected or not.