We've recently been having a great deal of problems trying to get a virgin instllation of ESX4 operating on a brand new OOB Dell PE 2950. We have NOT configured any guests on this system yet,
Basic problems are:
On startup, the vmware-authd service repeatedly stops and starts and
it takes sometimes up to 20 minutes before we can even logon via vi-client.
We cannot logon to the web gui - it throws error 503 service unavailable
Memory usage is incessantly high for our liking, for a system that's doing nothing, especially when compared to ESX3.5u4. (think 380MB, just after boot, again, doing nothing.)
We ran the diagnostics script to grab all the logs and events etc, and it ballooned out to 796MB (We have assigned 800MB to the COS, based on a VMware tech. specialist's advice)
It failed to even drop back down below 700MB after these logs collected.
We are not using any of the vSphere features, and do not intend to. The CPUs are Intel L5410, there's a total of 8GB system memory (4x2GB chips). All storage is local attached storage, no iscsi or SAN. We have a single Raid5 datastore, comprised of 6 146GB SAS 10K drives giving us a total of about 700GB.... we've run a full set of Dell diagnostics over the system and found no memory or cpu problems.
Any ideas as to where we can start looking, or what we can do to resolve this ?
