FreeBSD 7 and ESXi

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 02:44:13AM -0300, scuba at centroin.com.br wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Oct 2008, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> 
> |On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 02:04:07AM -0300, scuba at centroin.com.br wrote:
> |> Jeremy,
> |> 
> |> On Mon, 13 Oct 2008, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> |> 
> |> |On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 12:54:26AM -0300, scuba at centroin.com.br wrote:
> |> |> 	I'm facing some problems trying to install a FreeBSD 
> |> |> 7.0-RELEASE-amd64, on a Dell PE 2950III, dual Xeon Quad core, 8GB RAM.
> |> |> 	After (FBSD) boot menu count down, it shows a dump of the CPU 
> |> |> registers and a message: BTX Halted. No matter what is changed in VM 
> |> |> setup.
> |> |
> |> |Can you please download the 7.1-BETA2 ISO and try it instead?  There
> |> |have been changes to the FreeBSD boot loader between 7.0-RELEASE and
> |> |7.1-BETA2 which may improve things for you.  The 7.1-BETA2 ISOs are
> |> |available here:
> |> 
> |> 	The same behavior with 7.1-BETA2.
> |
> |I'm not sure what to do at this point, or what to tell you, since the
> |kernel can't even load.
> |
> |Are you installing this off of CD, and is the CD drive hooked up to
> |the PC via ATA/SATA (rather than USB or something else)?
> 
> 	It's a bit more complicated, since, for some reason the Vmware 
> client is unable to boot the VM from CD on the host server. It's 
> booting an ISO image on the client machine.
> 	I already read something saying that it's a known issue of the 
> ESXi.
> 	Without the virtulization layer, the amd64 CD boots without 
> problems in this machine. 

Ah, so the truth comes out... :-)

Have you brought this fact up with the VMware folks?  They're quite a
nice bunch, I wouldn't be surprised if they provided a hotfix for you
for this problem.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |