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After installing various versions of ESXi, from 6.5 to 7.0.3, the system does not boot after the installation completes and the server restarts — neither from the USB flash drive nor from the SSD.

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2

Are you getting any error messages?

I don’t have any experience with that server myself, but my first thought is to make sure you’re correctly booting using either CSM or UEFI depending on how you’ve installed the OS.

EDIT: After looking it up, it looks like that’s an older model. Are you able to boot any other OS? Could it be faulty hardware?

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I would make sure the BIOS is set to boot from the correct device as first boot device as well; installing to USB is all good and well but won’t work if the BIOS doesn’t try to boot from it.

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4

can you login to the iLO to verify there’s no device compatibility errors? BIOS version could be an issue. recommended Update 3 (U3). the iLO info screen with the various logs should be a good place to visit for details to review.

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5

there are no any errors and i tryed with achi and legacy mods but i not tried any other os’s

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6

I am tryed with all posible boot orders it is not working for me

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7

there are no any issues and all server drivers, bios and ILO are updated with last spp for gen8

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8

Have you tried the HP specific ESXi images?

VMware ESXi Images for HPE Servers | HPE
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/servers/hpe-esxi.html

Deploying and updating VMware ESXi on HPE servers
https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a00061651enw

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9

What are you installing TO, USB, SSD, RAID, non-RAID.

Your hardware is relatively old and any ESXi lower than 7 isn’t supported.

I will assume this is a lab given that information.

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10

yes about 10 diferent versions i think somthing connected with bios jus i cannot wind where to download any old compotible versions

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i tryed with usb and raid and yes i know that it is old but no it is a production server

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12

Prior to the upgrading, did you address HP’s connection manager issue?

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i am not see any issues

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14

You said it doesn’t boot, so there should be something on screen, something like ‘unable to find bootable media’

There must be something.

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15
  • Build 7.0.0-700012 supports ESXi 7.0 and provides 64-bit VIBs.
  • Build 7.0.0-650012 supports ESXi 6.5 and 6.7 and provides 32-bit VIBs.
    You need to uninstall the older connection manager to get rid of the 32-bit VIBs.
    If that’s already done, only thing I got left to suggest would be verify the hardware compatibility of the drives is good. If you’re not seeing errors, it could mean your RAID Card is too old for 7.0 to see.
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16

I ran some Gen8 DL380Ps some years ago and ran into similar issues for a while - those systems were a little particular.

You will want to make sure you’re using the HP-specific ESXI images, but there’s a specific process you will need to follow during the installation if my memory serves, that I think involves something like running the installation, but then during reboot, you have to remove the USB you loaded from while it’s powered off, then manually verify/change the boot target to ensure it starts from the newly installed image.

As others have stated, you may have to ensure that you have prepped the firmware on the system to ensure that it’s fully prepped to run your chosen version of ESXI. I recall this being frustrating until I figured out the precise sequence, as it seemed peculiar to me when I was doing it (this was quite a few years ago when I was in the process of doing a deployment for a completely redesigned server back-end using two old DL380Ps and preparing them to operate as part of a new VMware HA Cluster).

I apologize that I’m not recalling all of the specifics, but hopefully some of this will get you going in the right direction!

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17

I suspect that the issue may actually be with licensing. If you entered the license during installation, it tried to go out and activate itself. Broadcom, being the greedy SOBs that they are, have disabled perpetual license activation. I would certainly not put it past them to send back some kind of instruction to remove the boot sector of the software from the drive / array.

They are actually sending nasty “cease and desist” letters to all us owners of perpetual licenses. Because of their greed and all-round jerk-ness, we just jumped from VMware to Hyper-V. I literally migrated the last VM this morning! We are letting things ride on Hyper-V until next Tuesday to give everyone time to use everything and see if there are any problems. If we don’t hear about any problems, we will be shutting down our VMware servers for good. I will reformat the best of them and install Windows Server 2025 Datacenter and Hyper-V. It will be clustered with the other Hyper-V server for redundancy, and we will be free of VMware (Broadcom).

VMware is awesome software, the best hypervisor available, but Broadcom is doing their very best to kill it. Migrating to Hyper-V was really pretty easy. We simply removed VMware tools and ran a VM backup with Veeam. We restored the VMs to Hyper-V. With very little adjustments to the restored VMs (connecting them to the proper VLANs on the vSwitch and a few minor tweaks in networking), they were back up and running fine on Hyper-V. We have 14 VMs, 12 of them Windows of one version ore another, 1 Ubuntu, and 1 Debian. The Debian one failed to move, but it was in the process of being built anyway. We only lost about 2 hours work. Everything else is running great.

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18

We all can go on guessing until OP replies…

But from 1st hand experience, I do know that Dell & HPe have their own ESXi versions as some drivers are pre-installed.

Then the next thing is that we may also need to know where the boot up is stuck at coz it could be a RAID or BIOS boot issue ?

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19

Have you set the disk partition to be bootable in the array manager program (stand-alone or BIOS-based)?

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But MS licensing does not come cheap as well ? List Price without SA is approx $7k per 16 cores ?

Maybe I am lucky as I purchased the VMware maintenance for 3 yrs in Nov 2023…hopefully by then they wake up their idea ??

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