A systems administrator is alerted that a virtualization host running a hypervisor has become unresponsive. Upon checking the physical console of the server, the administrator sees the screen is filled with purple text containing diagnostic information, including a core dump. All virtual machines that were running on the host are now offline. What is this type of error screen commonly called?
The correct answer is a Purple Screen of Death (PSOD). This is a diagnostic screen displayed by a VMware ESXi hypervisor when its kernel experiences a critical, unrecoverable error. It is analogous to a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) in Windows or a Kernel Panic in Linux/Unix systems. The screen provides diagnostic information, such as the memory state, error codes, and a core dump, to help with root cause analysis.
A Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) is a stop error specific to Microsoft Windows operating systems.
A Kernel Panic is a critical error in Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux.
A memory dump is the content of recorded memory at the time of a crash; while it is displayed on a PSOD, it is not the name of the error screen itself.