Vmware ESXi 4.1 won’t boot correctly

vmware-esxi

I had a frozen VM on an ESXi 4.1 machine.

I attempted to kill it using the usual methods, but nothing seemed to work, so I rebooted the host machine fully.

Now when the host machine (not the VM!) boots, all I see is …

SYSLINUX 3.63 0x4afa90e9 EBIOS
Copyright (c) 1994-2008 H. Peter Anvin

for maybe 30 seconds or so, and then a blinking cursor comes up, and nothing seems to happen from there.

Does anyone have any suggestions on where to start? The server hardware seems correct.

Best Answer

It turned out that the system did eventually boot, after about 3 hours.

One of the hard drives in the raid array had corrupted, once it was swapped out everything was fine again.

Related Solutions

Installing ESXi 4.1 inside vmware server 2.0.2

I know it's a long time since you posted this issue, but I had the same issue myself.

It seems that a lot of people are having keyboard problems with ESXi 4.1, but the main resolution has been to plug in a different kind of keyboard - not very useful if you're trying to install ESXi on top of VMWare Server.

Anyway, taking a slightly different approach, I experimented with the kernel boot parameters and I found that adding acpi=off to the command line allowed the installation to continue.

So to do this, at the VMVisor (ESXi) boot menu, press Tab. Change the command line to read:

mboot.c32 vmkboot.gz acpi=off --- vmkernel.gz --- sys.vgz --- cim.vgz --- ienviron.vgz --- install.vgz

You should now be able to press Enter at the appropriate point and continue your installation.

After installation, you'll find the keyboard doesn't work again. This is okay as you can do everything from the VSphere Client anyway. But if you want the keyboard to work at the console, then first install the VSphere client.

Then connect to your ESXi machine and click the Configuration tab. Under Software you should find an Advanced Settings option (scroll down if you can't see it). Select this option then click VMkernel. Now uncheck the box that says VMkernel.Boot.ACPI. And click OK.

When you Reboot your ESXi machine (you can do this from the VSphere Client), you should now be able to use the keyboard at the console.

Scheduling VMWare ESXi 4.1 VM Restart

enabled ssh access to your ESXi
add cron job to the root crontab(/var/spool/cron/crontabs/root)

You can start, reboot, stop, and suspend virtual machines using vmware-cmd:

vmware-cmd -H <vc_system> -U <user> -P <password> --vihost <esx_host>
/vmfs/volumes/Storage2/testvm/testvm.vmx stop soft
vmware-cmd -H <vc_system> -U <user> -P <password> --vihost <esx_host>
/vmfs/volumes/Storage2/testvm/testvm.vmx start soft

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Installing ESXi 4.1 inside vmware server 2.0.2

Scheduling VMWare ESXi 4.1 VM Restart

Related Topic