Hi,
Recently we've installed ESXi 4.1 Update 1 embedded version on the internal SD card (SanDisk 2GB) for a few Dell PowerEdge M610 blade servers using the ESXi recovery CD from Dell, also available for download from the VMware site:
http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/dell_esxi_recoverycd/ZHcqYip3ZWJkKmV3
Yesterday we rebooted the servers to make sure everything would come back up.
To our surprise when ESXi come back up on each server, the whole configuration was gone: IP address, server name, password, everything was lost, the configuration was back as if we just installed ESXi.
Any ideas why that happened?
We did a proper reboot for ESXi: one of the servers was rebooted using vCenter, the others were rebooted using the ESXi DCUI using the F11 key.
Before the reboot, one of the ESXi server was up with its configuration for a few days and was managed through vCenter, the others were installed an hour or so before the reboot and weren't connected to vCenter yet: no matter how long they were up, all of them lost the configuration after the reboot.
And we've been unable to reproduce the issue so far, we've reconfigured ESXi on a couple of those servers today and rebooted them from the ESX DCUI: each of them came back online just fine this time, the configuration is still there.
We didn't reconfigure all of them, let me know if there is anything we can check on those still untouched after the reboot to tell how come they lost the configuration.
Thanks.