ESXi 6.5 Unregistering All Guest VM's On Reboot

[gurulee]

I installed ESXi 6.5 from a 32GB SD card (inserted into hyper-visor motherboard usb  port) and chose to install it on the same card during installation. I set the pass through on my LSI controller & USB controller, and applied a license. I rebooted and these changes retained.

However, I then added datastore1 (ssd) and uploaded backed up VMDK'/VMX's from prior EXSi 5.5 environment. All VM's were running fine....

I shutdown the VM's and rebooted the ESXi host.

To My surprise all the VM's unregistered themselves, but the license and pass-through settings retained.

I re-registered the VM's and rebooted ESXi host again, same result.

Any ideas?

[gurulee]

Anybody know what is causing this?

[IRIX201110141 · Accepted solution]

Most likely you have selecet the USB controller which holds the ESXi USB boot Medium as a passtrough device to a VM,  so your ESXi lose the medium after sucessfull booting.  Now he cant safe any configurations changes and this is why he forgets all registered VMs when rebooting.

What was the reason to passtrough a USB to a VM with the PCI passtrough option?

Regards,

Joerg

[gurulee]

@IRIX201110141,

This makes sense! I will toggle pass-through off on the USB controller and reboot to test.

[gurulee]

With my ESXi install residing on a USB stick via a hypervisor motherboard port, I cannot easily disable passthrough on the USB controller now. My problem at this point is: vmware vsphere - Cannot remove passthrough setup on ESXi - Server Fault

[IRIX201110141]

Yupp.. i dont see a way to take this configuration back and safe your esxi configuration.  One and only way should be a reinstallation of ESXi.

There is a way to prevent to autostart an 64bit VM which you add the one and only GFX card of your hosts trough PCI Passtrough but your USB Device is another story.  Question is what the ESXi does when you booting with detached Datastore so he cant apply the PCI Passtrough config to the VM because it doesnt exist anymore.  But i highly recommend not to playing around on your DS configuration so my advice would be to reinstall the ESXi on a different USB device and than later add all VMs back to the inventory.

Regards,

Joerg

[gurulee]

Having the USB controller in passthru was my issue. I was forced to reinstall esxi and it resolved the issue.