I just confirmed this on my end and oodles of googling finally brought me here. I updated my ESXi host from 6.0 to 6.5 and suddenly had crashing issues on my Ubuntu 18.04 virtual server that had been fine for months. I thought it was an Ubuntu issue so I switched to Debian 9 and had the same issue, even with 100% fresh installs.
I made a new VM using 6.0 compatibility level, installed Ubuntu fresh on it, got it up to date, added the repository and ran sudo apt install plexmediaserver. It worked.
Normally the VM would 100% lock up just after the install finished (SSH refused and console would not accept input). On reboot, if you ran sudo systemctl status plexmediaserver, you’d see that it degraded, showing an exit code of 255/n/a. If you checked the logs, you’d see a bunch of SQLite3 errors saying it couldn’t find a certain table inside the database. I deleted the VM out of frustration before grabbing the logs for history, I’m sorry.
There is something in the way 6.5 works that causes issues. I didn’t try other distros or Windows but I’m willing to bet a beer you’d get similar issues with other Linux distros. I’m really hoping others that are running ESXi see this!
