Installing ESXi 8 on Dell OptiPlex (Fixing Pink Screen of Death - CPU Mismatch)
🧩 Problem I attempted to install ESXi 8 on my Dell OptiPlex homelab machine, but during boot, I encountered a Pink Screen of Death (PSOD) with errors like: Fatal CPU mismatch on feature HW feature incompatibility detected This prevented ESXi from installing or booting successfully. ! 🛠️ Root Cause The issue is caused by modern Intel CPUs (12th Gen and newer) using a hybrid architecture with: Performance cores (P-cores) Efficiency cores (E-cores) ESXi expects uniform CPU cores, so it crashes when it detects different core types. ...