ESX / ESXi Bios Tools

I had it now on 8 servers, it cannot be a coincidence

I still notice unattended vmTools install in vCenter (so not interactive) may fail SOMETIMES with the same error despite the correct symlink.
Interactive ones (clicking through it) work fine and vCenter driven non-interactive autoupdates of VMtools work fine too, so I am a bit puzzled what other link may be broken with a SLICed host.

 

Would anyone experience that the bios extracted and modified form the latest VMware vSphere Hypervisor won't boot the VM (hang at showing the BIOS logo)?

 

most likely bad BIOS or bad s.v00
what did you use to slic the BIOS and what do to reintegrate it in the ESXi file?

 

Not sure if this is what it is supposed to do (though I think it is!) but with that line in a esxi 5 W2K8R2 guest it reports the system manufacturer as Supermicro and the model as my motherboard (msinfo32). With that set to "false" those fields show as Vmware / VMware platform.

 

I just use PhoenixTool 1.9.6 to add Dell SLIC into bios440.rom according bombaclat said (#244).
But I don't reintegrate back, just use this line in my VM setting file
bios440.filename = "/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/bios440_dell.rom"
And check correctly put the modified file in that directory.

 

Hi

I used ESXi Bios Tools v 1.1.4 on ESX Server 3i 3.5.0. But, I'm unable to extract nor inject bios440.rom as it keeps saying that "vmware-vmx: no such file or directory". For injecting I used "Dell_SLIC_2.1.rom". BTW, this file works flawless on VM Workstation

On the ESXi 5, tool starts and at the message "Determining latest Hypervisor Folder..." tool crashes.

I tried the tool with Windows 2003 x32 and Windows 7 x64, but no luck.

Is there anyone who could help me on this?

 

Copy the file(s) locally by hand & do the "magic", then copy the files back

sebus

 

Thanks for the quick reply.

I can not locate the vmx file. I searched through the folders.
Where is it actually located?

 

I tested your suggestion, make my test esxi under mainenance mode
i succeeded deleting original s.v00 in the bootbank folder, but i cannot copy the patched s.v00
because this error massage occur " no space left on device "

so anybody have solution ho to replace s.v00 in bootbank folder ?
have any spesial step i missed?

please help me

 

/bin

But if have problems with this, then better do not touch anything else

sebus

 

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I migrated from ESXi 4.1 (with modded bios) to ESXi 5. Including my old modded bios440.rom seems to work on my v7 VM's - but will it fail on new (v8) VMs - or any other reason I shouldn't continue to use this "old" bios?

 

I would certainly not do that, just patch the new one and never look back. You can even use the BIOS backup tool from the same guy as the SLIC tool if you are not familiar with it.

 

Ok so I followed everything I found here and ended up with what seems to be a working solution. I did however skip injecting a SLP string - what OS'es will this bite with? (Just XP?)

 

I had a strange thing happen when upgrading a machine from 7 to 8. I could not boot up any OS - had to reboot ESXi. Maybe related to the VMotion problems?

 

Pretty much NONE. Server 2003 SLP string is already built in default Vmware BIOS, for XP use loader (which works really well)

sebus

 

FYI, the new patches of VMware ESXi out since June 14th (will be 5.0 build 721882) requires to re-slic the vmx as it involves kernel & base fixes.

 

I patched the latest version of EsxBiosTools to make it work with ESX5i.

 

And it is... where?

 

I could not post links.... but here it is:

hxxps://rapidshare.com/files/2104462842/EsxBiosTools.1.1.5.7z