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Everytime I reboot my ESXi 5 host it returns to an old configuration (connected to old datastores and listing old virtual machines).

I have found a few oddities which are probably part/root of the problem but i'm not sure how to go about fixing:

  • /bootbank/boot.cfg is missing
  • /bootbank points to /tmp
  • when i issue df -h via ssh the only disks listed and NFS mountpoints, no local disk is listed
~ # df -h
Filesystem   Size   Used Available Use% Mounted on
NFS          1.4T 568.4G    828.7G  41% /vmfs/volumes/isos
NFS        119.2G  60.1G     59.1G  50% /vmfs/volumes/sql
NFS          2.7T 976.2G      1.8T  35% /vmfs/volumes/vms
~ # cd /bootbank/
/tmp # ls
imgdb.tgz    scratch      vmware-root

Any ideas on how to solve this?

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Are you using host profiles? Are there other hosts in your environment? – ewwhite Jan 16 at 1:47
I'm not using host profiles. There is 1 other host in the environment which isn't exhibiting these problems. – Lee Tickett Jan 16 at 8:45
Just found a few more hints (from the console): Logs are stored on non-persistent storage. Consult product documentation to configure syslog server or a scratch partition. – Lee Tickett Jan 16 at 13:12
The if i view syslog there are 3 messages: Ignoring volume (/vmfs/volumes/x) (does not meet size requirement - 261853184 bytes) followed by: Scanning 0 VMFS filesystems for scratch storage, using /tmp/scratch as scratch – Lee Tickett Jan 16 at 13:14
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2 Answers

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Are you PXE booting the image? This is fairly common if you are using PXE or other remote boot (like booting on iscsi) and you aren't updating the base image when you make updates.

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No. I'm booting from a USB stick. – Lee Tickett Jan 16 at 8:36
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up vote 0 down vote accepted

Whilst rebooting over IPMI i noticed Shift-R for recovery mode. After pressing the ESXi host booted without any datastores/virtual machines configured. I set them up and rebooted. Everything appears to be back to normal:

  • /bootbank/boot.cfg exists
  • df -h lists three vfat volumes as well as the NFS volumes

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm still curious to know how it broke- although glad to've resolved it without having to go to the physical location and re-install the hypervisor!

Lee

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