It's a proliant bl685 g7. It's been having network connectivity issues with it's flex fabric that I've been dealing with, so overall it's not a very happy server. I'm chalking it up as just another odd defect with the blade (one of many unfortunately). I have a scheduled outage tonight so I can reboot it.
For the tail I did, there was no &, it's just a vanilla "tail -f /var/log/vmkernel.log"