ESXi completely resets and looses all VMs and config following host reboot.

[AndyHa]

Hi,

I'm new to VMware, so I hope this isn't something obvious.

I've been playing around with ESXi 4.0 for the past few days to familiarise myself with the system before a big migration. It's really getting to me though that every time I reboot the host I Ioose all configuration data and ESXi essentially becomes a clean install again! Everything is lost, right down to the IP and host name. Needless to say after I've spent a few hours converting some servers this is very annoying!

I've been unable to find any mention of this problem and I've also been unable to spot any options in vSphere Client to save the config before a restart. The odd thing is that all the disks and datastores remain at the same level of capacity as they were before the reboot, indicating to me that the VMs are present on the disks, but ESXi just can't see them.

I'm running ESXi 4.0 on a HP ML115 with 4No. 80GB WD Caviars on SATA.

I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction on getting this solved.

Thanks in advance.

[Schorschi]

You are installing ESXi to DASD, be it disk, USB or SD device. For PXE boot installation where the ESXi image only exists in memory, this is normal behavior, because ESXi is stateless in such a configuration. It almost sounds like you have sometype of stateless configuration happening when you do not intent such.

[AndyHa]

I've resolved this now, or got round the problem anyway. I deleted all the partitions off all the disks and it appears to be holding it's config now.

[Schorschi]

Cool. This is not the first time, we have seen a bit of odd behavior along these lines. We now explicitly wipe the RAID controller configuration, recreate the RAID sets/logical volumes and initialize them before loading any ESX classic or ESXi. Even seen the VMware OS Installer refuse to clear partitions once in a while when you explicitly tell it via GUI or kickstart CFG to wipe out everything.