ESXi Fatal Error:6 (buffer too small)

[AWB1]

Hi everyone,

I built myself a new hypervisor and am having major issues getting ESXi to boot. I have been a VMWare user for many years but this problem has me really confused.

Every time it tries to boot, it will fail with "Error 6 (Buffer too small)" when decompressing a module file. The file it errors on is different each time it boots. The following builds of VMWare ESXi were tested and all exhibited the same symptom:

7.0U3f-20036589
7.0U3d-19482537
7.0U3c-19193900
7.0U2a-17867351
7.0U2-17630552
7.0U1c-17325551
7.0U1-16850804

The MD5 checksum for every .iso used was verified against the correct value on the VMWare website, installations were attempted using both local USB and virtual CD image via IPMI, and post installation, every VMWare module file in the bootable directory had its MD5 value manually matched with its pre-installation counterpart in the .iso file. The installations were performed on a brand new Micron MTFDKBA512TFH-1BC15ABYY NVMe SSD.

I could understand this kind of problem when booting from a USB or SD card, but not this. UEFI and Secure Boot are both in use, the system spec is as follows:

Motherboard: ROMED4ID-2T

CPU: AMD EPYC 7443P

Memory: 4x Samsung M386A8K40DM2-CWEZY

SSD: Micron MTFDKBA512TFH-1BC15ABYY 

 

Can anyone please offer me any assistance or suggestions?

[compdigit44]

Have you tried to disable secure boot as a test? Also the following article has some good suggestions on how to fix the error you are getting...

 

https://community.hpe.com/t5/ProLiant-Servers-ML-DL-SL/Buffer-failure-during-boot-Proliant-G9-VMware-6-7/td-p/7091744#.Ytmdm3bMK70

 

[AWB1]

Just wanted to update this with a conclusion, there's nothing worse than finding someone else who shared the problem you had but withheld how they solved it! In my case it was a BIOS update. ASRock rack have significantly more recent BIOS/UEFI available from their support agents than are available for download on their website...

[2netsolutions]

I have got a similar issue. see attachment