{"id":2533,"date":"2020-06-21T23:34:24","date_gmt":"2020-06-21T11:34:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zoyinc.com\/?p=2533"},"modified":"2020-06-21T23:34:24","modified_gmt":"2020-06-21T11:34:24","slug":"esx-boot-hangs-stuck-on-initializing-iov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zoyinc.com\/?p=2533","title":{"rendered":"ESX boot hangs &#8211; stuck on Initializing IOV"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I got the following error when booting ESXi 6 from a USB key but I believe the same problem is possible for other scenarios.<\/p>\n<p>So what I am talking about is you start ESX and it does the initial phase with the progress line along the top and then it floods the screen with yellow and has a progress bar along the bottom. Early on during this phase it hangs forever with:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Initializing IOV<\/p>\n<p>It would appear that &#8220;IOV&#8221; is Input\/Output Virtualization.<\/p>\n<p>The problem is that the hardware you are running ESX on doesn&#8217;t support IOV. So we need to disable this for your ESX setup.<\/p>\n<h2>Temporary disable IOV<\/h2>\n<p>The first thing to do is to at least boot ESX. This is achieved by booting ESX and pushing &lt;shift&gt;O during the very first part of the boot phase. When you get it right and it may take a few times, you will see something like:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-2536 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/www.zoyinc.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ESXIOVIssue01.gif\" alt=\"IOV Issue\" width=\"850\" height=\"53\" \/>At this point enter &#8221; noIOMMU&#8221;, note the space before\u00a0 noIOMMU, which will give you:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-2537 size-full aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.zoyinc.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ESXIOVIssue02.gif\" alt=\"IOV Issue\" width=\"467\" height=\"38\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Now press &lt;enter&gt; to continue booting ESX.<\/p>\n<p>You can do this everytime to restart ESX but I suspect this will get pretty boring and more than a little frustrating.<\/p>\n<h2>Permanently fix IOV<\/h2>\n<p>Boot your ESX server and customize the way you want but ensure you enable SSH access<\/p>\n<p>Login to the server via SSH as root or su as root<\/p>\n<p>Move to &#8220;\/bootbank&#8221; and edit &#8220;\/bootbank\/boot.cfg&#8221;, this should initially look like:<\/p>\n<pre class=\"crayon:false;\">bootstate=0\r\nkernel=tboot.b00\r\ntitle=Loading VMware ESXi\r\nkernelopt= installerDiskDumpSlotSize=2560 no-auto-partition\r\nmodules=b.b00 --- jumpstrt.gz --- useropts.gz --- k.b00 --- chardevs.b00 --- a.b00 --- user.b00 --- uc_intel.b00 --- uc_amd.b00 --- sb.v00 --- s.v\r\nbuild=6.0.0-2494585\r\nupdated=1<\/pre>\n<p>For the line &#8220;kernelopt&#8221; at the end add &#8220;noIOMMU&#8221;, again noting the space before noIOMMU, thus giving:<\/p>\n<pre class=\"crayon:false;\">kernelopt= installerDiskDumpSlotSize=2560 no-auto-partition noIOMMU<\/pre>\n<p>Save the file and restart ESX.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I got the following error when booting ESXi 6 from a USB key but I believe the same problem is possible for other scenarios. So what I am talking about is you start ESX and it does the initial phase with the progress line along the top and then it floods the screen with yellow [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1249,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[343,342,639,308],"class_list":["post-2533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-esx","tag-esxi","tag-iov","tag-vmware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zoyinc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zoyinc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zoyinc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoyinc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoyinc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2533"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoyinc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2539,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoyinc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2533\/revisions\/2539"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoyinc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zoyinc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoyinc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoyinc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}