What is wrong with my boot ?

[Heracles31]

Hi,

On the good side, my ESXi 6.7 U3 build 17700523 boot up to a completely functional state all by itself, unattended.

On the wrong side, it does so only by always going through Recovery...

The server is a Dell R820 with all firmwares updated (Bios 2.7.0 ; ... ). When I first noticed that, it was after playing around with the server, trying to run ESXi 7.0, doing some upgrade and patches, ... I thought that I broke something during one of this process and tried to fix it.

Tonight, I went down to re-installing ESXi completely using Dell's ISO for version 17700523. No patch, no upgrade, no extra package, no nothing. I also selected to Install (while preserving the datastore) and not to Upgrade. Reading about my problem, I found some VMWare docs talking about adding a UEFI Boot option pointing to /EFI/Boot/Bootx64.efi and tried it. No luck and the result is always the same :

Once the hardware / firmware is done booting itself (BIOS, Raid Controller, Lifecycle controller, ...) first VMWare message says "VMware Hypervisor Recovery", written in white at the center - top, above a white line. The server keeps going on and next says "Loading VMware Hypervisor".

Why is that ? What is this recovery mode that act by itself (not the SHIFT-R one) ? Why do my server always goes through recovery to complete its boot up ? What can I do to boot properly and normally (I do not consider Recovery as normal....) ?

Thanks for your help,

[Scott Vessey]

There is an area of VMTN for ESXi, thread reported asking moderators to move it there.

 

[E_Espinel]

Hello.
If your server is Dell PowerEdge R820 with Intel Xeon E5-4600 Series, according to VMware compatibility matrix it is only validated for version 6.5 and below.

Attached link litk:
https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/detail.php?deviceCategory=server&productid=20683

Now version 7.0 is presenting serious problems which are expected to be fixed in a future update 3.
In version 7 the partitioning has been modified, old hardware support has been removed and more internal changes have been made.

If your computer is working fine on version 6.7 I recommend you to stay on it as long as possible.

 

 

[Heracles31]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. Indeed, I know that my hardware is officially supported only up to 6.5. With 7, the Raid controller is not supported (non-native megaraid driver), so ESXi 7 does not see any drive. I could have it installed on a USB storage, PCI passthrough the Raid card to TrueNAS and re-use that one to expose the storage to ESXi but I chose not to do so. That is the kind of things I did and thought that could have damage my boot up process. But last night, after a fresh install from Dell's customized ISO for poweredge servers, all of that should have been cleaned.

Again, the server boot up by itself, unattended, to a fully functional state. As such, I doubt that the lack of official support is the root cause here. Even more that this install was successful without any blck magic using Dell's official ISO.

Any idea what that Recovery can be / How can I get rid of it ? It is more annoying than anything else but I like to have my setup under control and running as smooth as possible.

Thanks again,