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Background / Problem

Just experienced an issue where an ESXi host was upgraded from 5.0 --> 5.1 perfectly fine.

Then, I did a scan and remediated a patch (ESXi510-201210401-BG) Looking into the host on via the kvm switch, this appears to complete successfully.

However, on reboot, the server hangs at the "Initializing Power Management" phase.

I've read from various spots around the internet that this usually clears itself up again upon a cold boot, but given that our servers are in a different building with different access rules, the less I have to physically go there, the better. :)

Question

  • Is there anything I can do to avoid an ESXi host hanging at the "initialize power management" phase of boot after remediating the host to apply patches?
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  • do you have DRAC?
    – Zapto
    Dec 13, 2012 at 16:56
  • I'm not sure; I have a question in to some fellow admins to see if DRAC is enabled and if so, what the IP would be (I believe we're using a separate subnet for management access but it may not have been configured). I'm hoping so! Dec 13, 2012 at 16:59

1 Answer 1

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There's always a chance of a hang or an outage when working on the hosts in a cluster. Good thing you have other hosts :)

It's a bit of a risk... perhaps a bug. I've never encountered this through several dozen ESXi host updates via Update Manager.

Also check the firmware and the CIM agents installed on your host. When you went from 5.0 to 5.1, did you update the Dell CIM agents?

Open a ticket (SR) with VMWare at this point.

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  • I'll open a ticket soon, to be sure. Regarding the CIM agents, if using the Dell custom ISO for ESXi 5.1, that would have included the CIM agent update, correct? Or would I still need to create the extension baseline for the CIM to be updated? Was under the impression I wouldn't need that second step, but I could be wrong. Dec 13, 2012 at 17:07
  • I typically remove the CIM agents before moving between versions. It sounds like you uploaded the Dell ISO into the Update Manager? That should be fine.
    – ewwhite
    Dec 13, 2012 at 20:31
  • That's correct. Looks like it was just a temporary bug at this point. I updated 3 other hosts just fine. Thank you for the additional tip on the OpenManage; I was able to attach it as a host extension which I didn't know was possible previously. Lots of great advice in this answer! Dec 14, 2012 at 1:03

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