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jtmoree
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very slow boot of VMWare ESXi 5.5 host when installed to internal hard drive

We have some Dell R720 servers with 256G of RAM and 2 6core Procs.  When I install the ESXi client to the internal hard disks (mirrored array) it takes literally over 5 minutes to boot.  I can watch the vmware startup process slowly crawl the progress bar across the screen in 'recovery mode' before switching to the yellow background startup process.

Why is this process slow?  Why is an internal hard drive install using syslinux? (that's the first thing that shows on the screen).  If i had to guess I would say that the only supported installation is running from fat32 on a usb flash drive and that even hard disk installs use that same boot process.  Am I correct?

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brianm80
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I'm late to the party, but we were experiencing this same issue. The fix is an updated firmware to the internal perc.

It's like night and day.

DELL PERC H310 Mini Blades Firmware release 20.13.0-0007

|Last Updated 6/2/2014

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jtmoree
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Timed boot at 8 minutes in BIOS boot mode.  changed to UEFI and it drops to 4 minutes.  Still slow but better.  Add on 2 minutes for all of Dell's stuff and we went from 10 minutes to 6 for hard drive boot.  When booting from USB drive it's faster so I'm running esxi from USB.

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jrmunday
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Might be a long shot, but try disable C1E in the BIOS and enable the max power settings for performance. This makes a massive improvement to performance in our environment (using R815's). UEFI is always going to be quicker, but as far as I can remember it's only supported if you install the hypervisor using the appropriate boot method (ie. don't use BIOS boot, install ESXi and then change to UEFI without re-installing)

Also what controller is backing these disks? Are you on the latest firmware and drivers?

vExpert 2014 - 2022 | VCP6-DCV | http://www.jonmunday.net | @JonMunday77
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brianm80
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I'm late to the party, but we were experiencing this same issue. The fix is an updated firmware to the internal perc.

It's like night and day.

DELL PERC H310 Mini Blades Firmware release 20.13.0-0007

|Last Updated 6/2/2014

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