Unable to view console

[peter79]

Guys,

I need help with the following. I have just installed ESX 4.0 on a new server. The install seemed to go successfully. I connected to the new server using vSphere 4.0 and configured the storage, network and licensing. Once all of that is done I create the first VM (Window 2003 Enterprise). I configure the VM and power it on. However I can not see anything on the console not even the ESX logo you see at boot up.

We have a large ESX environment and have only just upgraded to vSphere 4. I was looking at some other Windows VM's (note that all these servers are up and running) and found the same console problem.

I'm not sure how to begin troubleshooting this, any idea's?

[MikeAdamo]

Hi,

Hope I can give you a few places to start your trouble shooting. With the new VM up and running and showing as "powered on" in the summary tab you can click on the console tab then right click on the new VM and under the Guest link try sending ctrl-alt-del and see if that kicks the screen back to normal. Also, what happens if you right click on the new VM and choose "open console"?

Somewhere else you can check is the properties of the new VM (right click on the new VM then select edit settings - VM has to be powered off to access) and under the video card section we have the radio button for 4MB of video ram allocated which deactivates the auto-detect settings. I can't remember if the defautl is auto-detect or not.

Hope this helped.

Mike

[peter79]

Mike,

Thanks for the help.

When I try sending the ctrlaltdel command I see no change in the console screen. Also when I click "open console" I still get the black console screen.

I tried both auto detect and 4 MB memory option under the video card settings. Same result for both.

As I said earlier we have VM's that are running (I can login to them remotely) but they just show a black screen in the the console.

[Troy_Clavell]

maybe this blog will be helpful?

http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/PlanetVM/2008/12/01/the-black-screen-of-death

....but if this is happening to every guest, it's probably a firewall issue