Hi HarisB,
the problem by running ESXi stateless is the complete absence of a persistence layer for the OS.
I spent a lot of time to figure out what is impacted using ESXI in a stateless manner. But I succeed.
By adding an ESXi host to a VIC Server the vpxa agent is tranferred to the ESXi Box. This agent is the only one that
will be installed on demand. If you look at boot time you will read a message similar to "Starting vpxa agent ..."
Now you must know that at the time you add an ESXi host to a VIC-Server a vpxa password will be always
generated and inserted into the /etc/shadow file (took long to figure this out). But the shadow file will
not survive a pxe-boot process and you endup with errors.
Try to insert the /etc/shadow file into a tgz file (e.g. local.tgz) and vpxa remains always connected.
Before this please look if you have an vpxa user in your /etc/passwd file and /etc/chkconfig.db show you
that vpxa is installed. There must be at the end /etc/opt/init.d/vmware-vpxa
If this is not the right answer please ssh into your box and look at /var/log/vmware/vpx/vpxa.log or
/var/log/vmware/hostd.log there you can find useful information how to react on certain problems.
IMHO is a waste of time and resource to try to pxe-boot a system and downloading more than 200MB
just in case I need to be able to update the box. I worked out another feasible way for me. Try to download the
Tools (linux.iso, windows.iso, netware.iso, solaris.iso, freebsd.iso and VMware-viclient.exe) to your
persistent datastore, then you could download the iso or exe file pointing to the address of the ESXi box
and browse the own datastore to download the files. Inside your VM you can mount the iso as loopback
device (Linux) or use WinImage to open an iso file (Windows) and extracting all this files and making a zip
or even better a selfextracting zip of it. So you can easily deploy the zip file and install them on your VM if needed.
Please consider to award points if this was a useful answer to your question
