I'm having an issue with my ESXi 3.5u4 (build 153875) server not automatically starting VMs on system start-up. First, let me say that "yes" I do have it configured to automatically start VMs on system start-up. The problem seems to be related to the fact that I have the NICs configured to use DHCP and the VMs live on an NFS server.
The ESXi box has two NICs (actually it has 5, but for the sake of this discussion I'll just say 2). One NIC provides access to the LAN so I can connect to it via VI Client. The other NIC provides access to a dedicated gigabit LAN to the NFS server. I have both NICs configured to get it's IP settings via DHCP. With this configuration, this is what I see from VI Client after system start up:
As you can see, the virtual machines configured on ESXi host "charlie.milcom.arinc.com" are listed as "Unknown" and "Inaccessible". When I go to the storage configuration screen, this is what I see:
As you can see, the two configured NFS datastores are listed as "inactive". However, when I go on the NFS server (which is a Debian GNU/Linux 4 server, if that is relevant), I see in the logs that those shares have been successfully mounted by "charlie".
When I click on "Refresh", then everything comes back to life:
The NFS datastores are listed as being available, and my VMs appear in the left hand panel. At this point, I can then manually start the VMs. It'd be nice if ESXi would retry starting the VMs by itself so it'll come on just as soon as whatever datastore the VM lives on becomes available, but apparently it doesn't do this.
This problem goes away if I configure the NICs to not use DHCP and just configure them statically; everything comes up by itself as it should. However, I would prefer to have the NICs be configured via DHCP. This way IP assignments for everybody on the network is done at one spot (the DHCP server). Besides, the option to use DHCP is being made available so it should work without any problems.
Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?
The ESXi box has two NICs (actually it has 5, but for the sake of this discussion I'll just say 2). One NIC provides access to the LAN so I can connect to it via VI Client. The other NIC provides access to a dedicated gigabit LAN to the NFS server. I have both NICs configured to get it's IP settings via DHCP. With this configuration, this is what I see from VI Client after system start up:
As you can see, the virtual machines configured on ESXi host "charlie.milcom.arinc.com" are listed as "Unknown" and "Inaccessible". When I go to the storage configuration screen, this is what I see:
As you can see, the two configured NFS datastores are listed as "inactive". However, when I go on the NFS server (which is a Debian GNU/Linux 4 server, if that is relevant), I see in the logs that those shares have been successfully mounted by "charlie".
When I click on "Refresh", then everything comes back to life:
The NFS datastores are listed as being available, and my VMs appear in the left hand panel. At this point, I can then manually start the VMs. It'd be nice if ESXi would retry starting the VMs by itself so it'll come on just as soon as whatever datastore the VM lives on becomes available, but apparently it doesn't do this.
This problem goes away if I configure the NICs to not use DHCP and just configure them statically; everything comes up by itself as it should. However, I would prefer to have the NICs be configured via DHCP. This way IP assignments for everybody on the network is done at one spot (the DHCP server). Besides, the option to use DHCP is being made available so it should work without any problems.
Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?
