Upgrade problem !!

[aaron_sf]

After upgrading my ESXi host from 6.0 to 6.5, I am now unable to SSH into it or connect to it in any way. It appears to freeze half way through booting up (last message displayed : nfs41client loaded successfully) ...

Hardware: MacPro 6,1

Q: What are my options?

TIA

[vembutech1]

Can you verify ssh server enabled on security profile after update ?

[zenking]

Is it part of a cluster? If so, how painful would it be to grab the config from another host and then do a fresh install of 6.5 on the host in question?

[Mrigendra9]

This is not a part of cluster.Please verify SSH is enabled on the host which is having issue?

Please go through the below steps

Enable SSH on VMware ESXi 5.5 via vSphere Client | Thomas Maurer

[aaron_sf]

how do I do that?

(I can't ssh into the box and I can't connect via the vSphere client...)

[aaron_sf]

it's a standalone host ... and I don't have another .... so a fresh install would mean losing all of my VM's ...

[aaron_sf]

is there a way to boot up the host with some kind of recovery cd .. so that i can copy my vm's off to my NAS box? (I have a NAS box connected to the host vis iSCSI)

[vembutech1]

Put a new install ESXi 6 on a flash drive. Connect that ESXi through vSphere client and configure iSCSI adapater again and verify the data store is accessible. Try to scan all disks and find the existing data store slice. If the disk is shown and can access the folders inside the datastore all works fine. Shut down the ESXi server.

Insert another local disk on the ESXi 6 machine,boot through flash drive, and format the new local disk for datastore. Rescan the datastore and check both datastore are accessible, and move the files from iSCSI datastore to local datastore.

[zenking]

"so a fresh install would mean losing all of my VM's"

I was afraid of that, but figured I'd ask.

[aaron_sf · Accepted solution]

ok well after a bit of googling I found the answer in William Lam's blog post:

http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2017/01/esxi-6-5-support-for-apple-mac-pro-61.html

adding the boot option:

prefervmklinux=True

allowed the host to finally boot up .. yay!

also:

Installing ESXi 6.5 on Apple MacPro 6.1 fails (2149537) | VMware KB