Unable to install Guest

[Doders69]

Hi all..

Ive been a long time user of the Virtual Server 1.04 software and love it. I thought it may be time to dip the toe in the water of the ESX side of things, so I downloaded the Trials and have installed it all.

So far so good. Now its come time to give a Guest install a crack and I cant get it to work properly.

Im trying to install Server 2003 and for the life of me I cant get it to boot from the CD when its in the Host drive. If I have it mapped to Client Device and one of my local DVD roms it works fine, but when its set to Host device, it never boots from CD and I always get the Operating System not found message.

Given that im not a linux person, im not even sure that the ESX server has mapped the DVD rom device it to the right place ( its set as /vmfs/devices/genide/vmhba0:0:0 )

Does anyone have any advice for me ( apart from Install it over the network !! ).

Cheers

Paull

[Doders69]

NVM... a 3rd reboot and works OK now...

[Doders69]

Ive changed my mind again, its not working. Ive got a Server 2003 Install to work after rebooting the ESX server twice, it then picked up that it had a CD in the drive, now im trying to do a Vista Install, and once again it doesnt recognise there is a CD in the drive. Please dont tell me I have reboot the ESX server everytime I need to do an install from CD/DVD.

Anyone have any clues ??

[jbshcmhc]

Im having the same problem. When powering on the VM it tries to network boot(no matter the boot order in the VM BIOS). I'll have to try rebooting the host but its been rebooted a few times already with no different result.

[jbshcmhc]

Just to add. I tried rebooting several times with the same end result. VM tries to network boot every time. I even tried forcing the boot device by depressing "Esc" during POST and manually selected CDROM. Still same result.

Guest OS was the same as the original posters Windows 2003 Server Standard R2

[torontoguy]

make an ISO image of your install cd, copy it over.

point your VM to start off the ISO image.

[jbshcmhc]

Im not sure that I want to have to do that for every OS I plan on running as a VM on this server. Thing is that before I installed ESX 3i on this box I was running the free VMWare Server on it. I installed 3 2k3 VM's and the CDROM install worked flawlessly.

Now with ESX 3i it wants to network boot no matter what I do. Doesnt make me feel too confident with my purchase of ESX if this is the only solution.

[glucot]

With ESX 3.0.2 you could interrupt the network boot by hitting the ESC key. You were then given a couple of funtion key choices, one of which booted from CD. ESX 3.5 allows you to interrupt the network boot with the ESC key but doesn't provide any keystroke options. When I do hit a key after the network boot is interrupted I get an error message stating "NTLDR is missing." I'm not sure how to proceed from here with the CD boot. I'll give the ISO image a try.

Greg

[jbshcmhc]

Here is some info I found that could be helpful...I'll leave that up to those who use it.

http://www.vmweekly.com/ask_an_expert/how-to-make-an-iso-image-from-a-cd-and-deliver-it-to-esx/1/

I also wanted to point out that like the initial poster, I am able to install using the client CDROM. Its just that its much slower than being able to use the CDROM on the host box.

For me, I think I'll just use the client CDROM on this box. Its less of a PITA than creating an ISO(especially since 2k3 R2 has 2 discs) and pointing to the ISO. I just wish there was an answer as to why the host CDROM works perfectly fine on the free VMWare server and not ESX 3i 3.5.0. I could understand an argument of possibly unsupported hardware(ie CDROM in host)...but my previous sentance disputes that easily.

[Doders69]

Thanks for the link. Unfortuantely 3i doesnt have a cli so there is no way to get to the stage described in the article. This is a real problem. One of our ESX servers was going to be hosted off site, so building servers from it is going to be impossible, there is no way im installing Server 2003 across our Satellite connection.. HMMM what to do.

[glucot]

This is what worked for me whether I used an ISO image or the bootable CD. I unchecked the box to connect the network adapter at power on, when I created the VM. Next, I powered on the VM and let it go through the network boot steps. When the network boot failed, I connected the CD to either an ISO image or the physical device and pressed the ESC key. Windows setup booted and I proceeded with the installation.

Greg

[jbshcmhc]

Greg...thanks for the information. I will be sure to try that. Yesterday I just used the client CDROM map to install a couple of VM's on the ESX 3i box. It went slower than I would have liked, but at least I now have them up and running.

I think I will try to initiate a new VM with your advice just to see if I can achieve the same result as you. However it still leaves me at least thinking that VMWare should document this better to save confusion. I can only guess that this isnt the "normal" behavior of the software or else it would be better documented.

Again, thanks for sharing.

[glucot]

Here's something I did that might work for you. I built the VM from scratch on a local ESX server. Next I used VMware Converter to export the VM to the local drive on the server that is running VC. Next I used VMware Converter again to load the locally stored VM on to another ESX server. It might take less time to do this over the satellite link than to perform the actual 2003 Server installation. There is also something you can do with VM clones and templates but I'm not experienced with these tools.

Greg

[dbullion]

Go into BIOS just like in physical machine and change boot order to CD rom first. Be sure and connect client CD Drive before rebooting. Also in Edit VM change the delay under boot options to 200 Milliseconds.

Hope this helps.

[kamphor]

try to parse through the boot log for your cd/dvdrom drive:

egrep "CD|DVD" /var/log/dmesg

Most ide cd/dvd drives are hda, but if your particular system has only scsi, then it may be listed as scd0 or something.

my test system for esx3 has the following output:

root@esxsrv01 dev# egrep "CD|DVD" /var/log/dmesg

hda: TSSTcorp CD-RW/DVD-ROM TS-H492C, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

hda: ATAPI 48X DVD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 1536kB Cache

Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12

if you can explicitly type in the host device to use for the guest cd/dvd, then try /dev/"the_device_name". so mine would be /dev/hda

good luck!

-kamphor

[aleksey]

Has anyone already filed an SR for this issue (or willing to file one)? We'd like to contact you off-line to follow up on this defect. Please let me know the SR #.

Would you mind also posting what hardware you are seeing this problem on?

thank a bunch.

-aleksey