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Console OS (Service Console) Crashes after Device Allocation
Details
After I allocate all my devices to the virtual machines, my
console operating system (Service Console) complains about a panic
and fails to boot. What is wrong?
Solution
Most likely, you allocated all your SCSI/RAID disks to the
virtual machines, leaving the console operating system (Service
Console) with no SCSI/RAID disks. If the operating system was
installed on a SCSI/RAID disk, the console operating system
(Service Console) will be unable to boot from the SCSI/RAID disk,
since it was not allocated any SCSI/RAID adapters or disks. You
will have to get into the system somehow to assign the SCSI/RAID
adapters in such a way that the console operating system will have
access to the disk on which it was installed. Otherwise, you may
have to reinstall and try again.
The other possibility if you are booting from a SCSI or RAID
disk is that your initrd image file might be corrupted. The initrd
file should be in your /boot directory and you should have a line in your /etc/lilo.conf that looks like the following for ESX
Server 1.0 or 1.1:
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.2.14-vmnix1.img
For ESX Server 1.5 and 1.5.1, it looks like the following:
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.9-vmnix1.img
This line must be associated with the boot image that you are
trying to use to boot. The initrd file contains a series of device drivers that
needed to be loaded so that you can boot. If you do not have this
file in /boot and an entry in /etc/lilo.conf, your system may not be able to find the
device drivers that it needs to boot from your SCSI/RAID disk.
To create your own initrd file, you can use the mkinitrd command. For example, if you want to create a newinitrd file for the vmnix kernel distributed with ESX
Server 1.0 or 1.1, type
