We have a Debian 8 VM that enters a kernel panic when booting up on ESXi 6. If I edit the VM settings and change the configure OS from "Debian 7" to "Windows NT" the kernel panic resolves and the VM works fine. This has now happened several times on several different hosts, in some cases before the VM was upgraded and was still running Debian 7; on the other hand, in most hosts (including ESXi 6) the same VM runs fine with no kernel panics.
These VMs are running in customer environments, so I'm unable to debug the problem on-line. What could be causing this, and what logs/information should I collect the next time it happens to be able to analyze it effectively?