I just noticed this new KB article that deals about not being able to upgrade ESXi on a Dell box because of the fact that the virtual media is attached:
Upgrade to ESXi 3.5 Update 2.
If you cannot upgrade to ESXi 3.5 Update 2, use the following workaround:
- Connect to the DRAC through ILO, as follows:
- Open the Media tab.
- Open the Configuration tab.
- Deselect the Attach virtual media check box.
- Attach the virtual media
- Using the virtual media, boot the machine.
- When the recovery CD is fully loaded, disconnect the virtual media and proceed with the recovery.
Which reminded of the nice I/O errors this Dell DRAC virtual media produces when attached. So be sure to detach the virtual media before you actually run ESX(i). Same goes for Fujitsu blades by the way, when a virtual media has been present it also produces these nice I/O errors:
Feb 12 09:16:47 esx1 kernel: SCSI device sdc: 2097151 512-byte hdwr sectors (1074 MB)
Feb 12 09:16:47 esx1 kernel: sdc: I/O error: dev 08:20, sector 0
Feb 12 09:16:47 esx1 kernel: I/O error: dev 08:20, sector 0
Feb 12 09:16:47 esx1 kernel: unable to read partition table
Which isn’t as bad as it seems, it’s just not able to read the partition. For Fujitsu blades the only workaround I’ve seen so far was to completely disable USB before booting.
Reminds me of the old bug in GSX 3.x on Dell 8th-gen servers (1850/2850’s) with DRAC4 cards. If you had a virtual machine that had its CD-ROM drive connected to the drive letter on the host that mapped to the DRAC virtual CD-ROM drive and you powered on the VM the entire host would lock-up… that was special.