DL360-G8 install onto USB/SD with ESXi 5.5-U2

[podrush]

Hi folks,

This one is driving me nuts and I would appreciate some help.

I am building a new VMWare VSphere environment, or I would like to if I can get past the first and most basic task of installing the ESXi hypervisor onto the SD card or USB stick.

I bought a 'diskless' pair of DL380G8's with 96GB of memory.

I have downloaded the HP customised ESXI build ISO VMware-ESXi-5.5.0-Update2-2068190-HP-5.76.36-Sep2014.iso and burned it onto a bootable CD. Basically I never get past the point of loading the installer beyond the PSOD where is reports 'no place on disk to dump data'

I appear to be able to 'see' the SD card reported as present in ILO

I have tried * and 16GB USB drives to no effect.

SATA is set to legacy (not AHCI) in BIOS.

Disks formatted as FAT32

Any ideas?

thanks as always in advance...

cheers

Graham

[podrush]

Just an update on this- I reverted to 5.1 and it works just as I would expect- it sees the internal USB storage and installs and runs like a charm-

Is there a way for me to run an upgrade as an executable rather than a boot of 5.5.x? I doubt it from what I am reading but this issue has seriously wasted a lot of my time  today.

I am going to open a case with VMWare support on this-

sigh/

Any input appreciated.

thanks

Graham

[podrush · Accepted solution]

Not sure if anyone cares, but the answer to this was that there is a patch for certain server (G8 configs) like mine.

the patch was here:

This seems to be a known issue. As discussed I have linked a kb article below which outlines the issue and resolution:

ESXi 5.5 Update 2 fails with purple diagnostic screen error: IOMMUDoReportFault IOMMUProcessFaults (2090039)

  http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=209003...

the easiest way to apply this was to upload the patch to a datastore and execute via esxcli software install vib /vmfs/volumes/yourdatapathere/etc...

Obviously you need to enable your host for SSH in the console first...

thanks

Graham