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polysulfide
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Sync ESXi 4.1 boot images

ESXi 4 has redundant boot images.

Often, if I have a hardware issue / PSOD, or a hang on boot then ESXi will revert to the backup image.  This has a significant impact while running the 1000v as the second image will not have the VEM installed or it will have an older VEM.

Does anyone know a way to sync the boot images while in a known-good state?

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FranckRookie
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Hi Polysulfide,

ESXi is supposed to backup its configuration automatically every hour. Maybe you can use the auto-backup.sh script. Have a look at the following article.

Good luck.

Regards

Franck

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FranckRookie
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Hi Polysulfide,

ESXi is supposed to backup its configuration automatically every hour. Maybe you can use the auto-backup.sh script. Have a look at the following article.

Good luck.

Regards

Franck

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Dave_Mishchenko
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What sort of hosts are you running?  In the case of a reboot or PSOD ESXi should still try to boot from the newest bootbank. It would be possible to sync up the 2 bootbanks but you'd go into the realm of unsupported and I'd focus on why the hosts are rebooting so often first. Are you running the initial release of 4.1?  If so there are a couple of patches out so if you installed one the version difference between the bootbanks would be minimal and perhaps that would eliminate the VEM issue.

polysulfide
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Hmm, well there's nothing wrong with the cron scripts and all of the important configuration details are still present, just not the VEM.  I guess this may just be a bug in the backup script.  I'll file a bug with VMware.

That does answer my question though, thanks!

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polysulfide
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It's a huge UCS environment.

The hosts aren't PSODing or rebooting regularly once in production.  The PSOD is rare.  More often the server will just hang on boot prior to burn in.  Most of this reboot activity is part of the normal host onboarding process not a systemic problem.

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