Noticing none of the settings in an ESXi 6.7 installation are surviving reboot.
I created the USB with a stock installation ISO like always, downloaded from the VMWare website. Just used the USB key like a normal drive. Have been doing this for several years now. Been using ESXi since version 5.5.
Have had a FreeNAS VM with the SATA controller on a Supermicro X9SCL-F passed through the whole time, too.
I upgraded (via new install) to 6.7 tonight. I toggled the SATA controller to passthrough, reboot. Upon reboot, passthrough disabled.
I thought maybe it was the fault of the VMKernel.boot.disableACScheck = false flag, so I set it to true. Reboot, flag set to false again.
I tried setting a VM to autostart. Reboot, VM not set to autostart anymore.
That's when I noticed -- none of the settings are surviving a reboot.
Now I've set boot.cfg to include the following:
kernelopt=autoPartition=TRUE skipPartitioningSsds=TRUE autoPartitionCreateUSBCoreDumpPartition=TRUE
Settings still appear not to be persistent.
During boot I'm seeing the following regarding passthrough:
method invocation failed: pcipassthrough->start() failed: error while executing the cli
Does anybody know what's going on? This is really frustrating. I've been struggling with it for hours.
I wanted to follow-up on this and how I got it solved:
Well, not sure I really solved the issue itself, I just gave up on the whole thing.
I re-installed ESXi by getting the 6.7 ISO and using ESXi to make fresh boot USBs for my three servers - something about running the updates wasn't taking, especially with one system in particular I had asked about, the X9SCL-F, which I noticed in the HCL hasn't officially been supported since version 5.1.
Wish I had figured out what the issue was and devised a function to solve it, but my guess is there were lots of issues culminating and I should feel lucky that it runs on my old servers at all.