Workstation 7.1.3 - ESXi Crashes, installs fine

[steventaylor]

I posted this to the Fusion community and recevied no response. I thought that it was a fluke and gave up. I had thought I could do the installation on my Laptop (Windows XP SP3 w/4GB of RAM, Core2Duo) with Workstation. And much to my suprise, the same thing happened.

Again I had tried different versions of ESXi, the installaion runs fine (I have used these ISOs to build production servers, so I can't it it being the image). But I start it and after a short amount of time, the screen below appears.

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I have a need to install ESXi on my iMac.

Its an i7 2.8GHz with 8GB of RAM.

I followed the basic steps of creating a new VM, selected ESX as the guest operating system (and one time pointed to the ISO and let Fusion detect that it was ESXi).

When I start the machine, it runs, I can ping it, and I can work in the menus. But after approxiamtely 30 seconds, the ESXi server crashes. I get this error:

I have tried different builds of ESXi, including 4.1, 4.0 Update 2 and 4.0 Update 1.

I have increased RAM, increased processor count and tried different hardware settings (the default includes a USB controller that I removed)

There is nothing special about my MAC so I'm confused why I'm having trouble with a supported version of ESX in Fusion.

Any advice would be appreciated. I know the Forums have been a great help to me in the past.

Thanks for the help,

Steve

[steventaylor]

One other thing that happened in Workstation that I didn't mention below:

After the machine crashes, a window appears from Workstation that says:

"The CPU has been disabled by the guest operating system. You will need to power off or reset the virtual machine at this point"

Thanks,

Steve

[r_lam · Accepted solution]

Are you using a customized version of ESXi, for example from HP or Dell?

If so try the one from VMware and not the hardware vendor.

[continuum]

attach  the vmware.log from last start = then we can check

[steventaylor]

I don't believe it, that was exactly what it was. I must have been using one of our HP ISOs.

I started thinking it was something with the ISO once the same error popped up on my Mac and my Laptop.

Thank you for setting my head straight.

Steve

[r_lam]

You're welcome Steve