ESXI 5 machines have inventory disappear on reboot

[dmlavigne1]

I have a weird issue, I have built a couple of ESXi 5.0 whitebox machines that I have booting on a USB stick.  On every machine reboot, the inventory is lost and has to be readded from the storage devices which it detects fine.

The system specs are:  3 standard HDD, 2 SSD, no raid or anything, 32GB ram, Gigabyte Technology Z68X-UD3H-B3 board bios F11.

Both machines behave the same way running ESXI 5.0 469512.

Is there anything I can check or is more info needed?

Thanks

[VTsukanov]

Your ESXi host works in stateless mode.

You need to check :

1) that log file /var/log/sysboot.log contains no errors

2) that partition /bootbank & /altbootbank mounted (ls -la /)

3) that the file /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root (cat /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root, normal state

1    1    *   *   *   /sbin/tmpwatch.py
1    *    *   *   *   /sbin/auto-backup.sh
0    *    *   *   *   /usr/lib/vmware/vmksummary/log-heartbeat.py

contains call /sbin/auto-backup.sh)

4) the script /sbin/auto-backup.sh runs without errors, and saves the configuration host to a file /bootbank/state.tgz

[dmlavigne1]

After researching stateless, you are right.  How do I change the state to stateful so my configurartions are kept?  Ideally, I would like to keep this information on the USB drive.  

I have a previous ESXI 3.5 machine that is stateful and upgraded to 5.0 through various steps that does not have this problem.  I can't remember if there was a setting or what I missed when installing the new ESXI 5.0 servers on the USB

[VTsukanov]

First you need to figure out which leads to a stateless state of the ESXi host

Above, I suggested to you a few steps that you can use to try to diagnose the problem