On a VMware ESXi 5.5 Update 3 host, following a snapshot consolidation task, you may experience symptoms such as: An unexpected virtual machine failure occurs after snapshot consolidation, Virtual machine outage occurs post consolidation or specific entries in the virtual machine’s vmware.log file.
This issue occurs due to a segmentation fault when changing the snapshot tree data-structure. This is a known issue affecting VMware ESXi 5.5 Update 3 hosts and is resolved in VMware ESXi 5.5 Update 3a.
For more information, go to VMware KB here – http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2133118