
ESXi 4.1 U1 on P5NTWS crashes under heavy I/O load
Hello,
first post, hoping to get some thoughts.

I'm running ESXi 4.1 U1 on a P5NT WS based machine.
I have a WinXP Pro SP3 system (and some other VMs) running on that host to do some administrative tasks.
That works without any hazzle. The system runs straight and stable for several weeks.
Now I decided to add fileserver functionality to it and shared some space on the HDD. Therefore I added a new datastore and created a shared folder on it.
When I copy many files (total 6GB in around 4.800 files) from another Windows host to the shared folder, the complete host gets stuck after some time and the HDD-activity LED doesn't turn off anymore. Administration screen doesn't respond anymore, too.
This happens on any SATA port on the board. Also with additional installed fixed disks. RAID functionality is turned off in BIOS.
I also tested it with the Turnkey FileServer virtual appliance - same behaviour.
Does anyone have an idea what may cause this error? I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks in advance.
Robert