Cannot boot from an ISO located on an NFS datastore

[sirozha1]

Hi,

I store all of my ISOs on an NFS share located on a NAS. I used to be able to create a VM, check the "Datastore ISO File" checkbox when CD/DVD drive is highlighted in VM properties on the "Hardware" tab, and navigate to the ISO that I wanted to boot from in order to install a guest OS.

This is the first time I have tried to do this in ESXi 5, and my VMs cannot find the bootable ISO I'm pointing them to. I never had this problem on ESXi 4.0. I even removed the NFS datastore and added it again. ESXi 5 has no problem browsing the datastore with all of my ISOs, but the VMs cannot find ISOs when I am powering up VMs. I have tried this with several ISOs. I do make sure that the "Connect at power on" checkbox is selected before I power up a VM. I have also gone into BIOS and moved the CD/DVD drive to the top of the list of bootable devices. VMs still cannot boot from these ISOs.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[sirozha1]

To clarify, the VMs I'm creating are Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit). The guest OS is Cisco Call Manager.

I have just tried to do install Windows 7 by booting from an ISO in the same NFS datastore, and the newly created Windows VM had no problem seeing that ISO and booting from it. So, this is something to do with the type of VM - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

Edit: Never mind. The same Linux VM could boot from the NFS datastore. So, this is something to do with the Linux ISOs I have. I will need to do more investigation now.