ESXi 5.0 - not saving changes to SD. Changes gone after reboot

[nfarroar]

Attempting to resolve issues with USB passthrough and needing to make changes to the configuration. Each time a change is made, it is destroyed after a reboot.

After digging around in the shell, it looks to me that the system is using the configuration file /local.tgz instead of /bootbank/state.tgz. Ive made changes and each time I've checked these files. Inside the esx.conf file I am seeing that nothing changes on the local.tgz file but does on the state.tgz file. This might not mean anything and I could be looking at this all wrong. I've confirmed that backups are happening on the hour +1 min and I've done manual backups with the /sbin/auto-backup.sh script.

One thing to mention is that when I do make changes and run auto-backup.sh I see that it lists changes and I can see that it is reverting to what I am guessing is in the local.tgz file.

I've read of a number of different ways to address this but none seem to be helping.

I did attempt to copy the state.tgz file over the local.tgz file and adjust permissions on it. Upon reboot, the local.tgz file reverted back to the original date which was the 13th but the state.tgz file stays updated it appears.

I'd think that I should be able to just somehow point the system to boot off of the state.tgz file but I don't know if that is possible / should already be happening / makes sense considering we are using an SD card to boot off of.

I've read in this document http://www.vm-help.com/esx41/adding_files_to_state_tgz.php that if using an SD card, it will boot off of the local.tgz file.

I've used this guide http://store.vmware.com/store/vmware/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/ThemeID.2485600/productID.28435...

to see if I could adjust the scratch file location... this change doesn't persist either after a reboot.

I think the only way that I could fix this issue is to boot to a linux iso and make changes.

Any ideas on how to fix this or is there a way to tell the system to sync local.tgz and state.tgz?

Thanks.

[nfarroar]

I've gone through this process as well:

ESXi hosts seems to skip writing configuration to SD card

I see that the configBundle file does save to the datastore location that I created but I'm not confident that this changes anything. All it appears to have done is to backup the config onto the datastore but if I reboot I suspect that the scratch file location I set and all other changes will be lost again as the local.tgz file remains unchanged.

[nfarroar · Accepted solution]

I've gotten the issue sorted out.

For anyone who need assistance on this I hope this helps:

Found that when under the host configuration -> advanced settings if the USB devices are set to passthrough, they will not be able to be monitored by the usbarbitrator service. This service allows for the VMs to be able to use the USB devices.

I wasn't able to change this due to the system not updating the SD card when configuration changes are made.

Two options:

Edit the esx.conf file on the SD card

or

Re-install ESXi

I went with option 1.

used this post

How to disable ESXi Passthrough my findings

Used Ubuntu desktop iso to live boot into the system.

From there I was able to edit the files and reboot ESXi. This fixed my issue.