ESXI 4 on SD card doesn't hold config through reboot

[Lafflin]

I am just getting my feet wet with ESXi and I've got a few production machines up and everything is ok until I reboot. Once I reboot I have to enter in all my IP info and completely reconfigure all my settings. I than have to scan for data stores and  turn on each of the VMs individually.

I have downloaded Power CLI, CLI, and I have SSH access to the ESXI host this is happeneing on. I thought this might be a fluke thing, perhaps my SD card had an issue. I since bought a second HP DL380G7 with an embedded SD card and I fear the same thing is going to happen. This is a production machine so I haven't actually tried to bounce it yet, but when I try to backup the config using the "vicfg-cfgbackup -save" command I get a 404 not found error just as I do the first one. This command however is successful on a server which does not involve an SD card. Also I have noticed in my investigating  that there is no state.tgz or local.tgz file within my bootbank directory on both of the servers that have the SD card.

I'm sure someone knows why this is happeneing and I'm hoping to be pointed in the right direction.

Thanks in advance for any effort given to this.

[liquidz]

Hello,

Could you check if the SD Card is in read only somewhere ?

Also, could you try to put a file on it and see if it remain after a reboot ?

[Lafflin]

VMware is installed on both of these SD cards, so it's probably unlikely that they both can't hold data. I think that covers the read only idea as well. Another dart?

[liquidz]

I don't know if you checked this ;

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1710379

[Lafflin]

I did see that, but I don't see that the problem was solved...or even that anyone was on the right track. It isn't a bad SD card, it's not a Dell OEm CD issue (mine was straight from VM), it wasn't a corrupt install...I don't know what the takeaway is supposed to be, but it's kinda a long article so if I'm missing something please don't hesitate to point it out. As I see it though their issue was never solced was it?

[liquidz]

Hello,

Seem that not a lot of people can help you;

This seem interesting in the previous article;

" it looks like the /bootbank was not updated in your faulty systems.  /bootbank contains all the .tgz files where the state of the ESXi is  stored. 

There  is a script in ESXi called backup.sh which takes care of updating the  state of the ESXi ( like network re-configuration if any etc ) in /bootbank. The backup.sh normally runs in every hour i think. This  should have ideally taken care of updating required configuration files  modified as part of updating netwrk info, password etc ( User  configurable settings in ESXi ). But In your case, it looks like the  backup script may have failed to update the state of the SD card with  the new configurations. can you run backup.sh manually on those faulty  system and see the time it takes with the sandisk SD card?

So replacing with the supported SD model will be ideal and see if you can reproduce the issue?"

Could you chek the presence of this script and run it ?

Could you check the presence of a directory /bootblank on the system ?

[Lafflin]

A few things to clear up.

When you instal ESXi to a USB or SD card the system config is NOT stored in the state.tgz, it is stored in local.tgz.

Not knowing this was my first problem as I was running auto-backup.sh and  then looking to see if the timestamp (of the wrong file) updated.

After gaining an understanding of that I came to the realization that only one of my servers was having the issue. I had originally assumed that it was both servers because neither had the state.tgz....one of the two servers does have the local.tgz and is in fact fine. HW is the same for both servers.

When I run the auto-backup.sh all I get is "boot type: visor-usb"

I was able to verify that I could write to the drive.

I don't know what the problem is, but I am upgrading from 4.1 to 5....I've also purchased a license now to open up the full power CLI functionality. I'm just going to reinstal and chalk this all up to a crash course.

Thanks for trying.