ESXi 6.7 can't change settings, don't survive reboot (passthrough issues, too!)

[AveryFreeman]

Fun times

Noticing none of the settings in an ESXi 6.7 installation are surviving reboot.

I created the USB with a stock installation ISO like always, downloaded from the VMWare website. Just used the USB key like a normal drive.

Have been doing this for several years now. Been using ESXi since version 5.5.

Have had a FreeNAS VM with the SATA controller on a Supermicro X9SCL-F passed through the whole time, too.

I upgraded (via new install) to 6.7 tonight. I toggled the SATA controller to passthrough, reboot. Upon reboot, passthrough disabled.

I thought maybe it was the fault of the VMKernel.boot.disableACScheck = false flag, so I set it to true. Reboot, flag set to false again.

I tried setting a VM to autostart. Reboot, VM not set to autostart anymore.

That's when I noticed -- none of the settings are surviving a reboot.

Now I've set boot.cfg to include the following:

kernelopt=autoPartition=TRUE skipPartitioningSsds=TRUE autoPartitionCreateUSBCoreDumpPartition=TRUE

Settings still appear not to be persistent.

During boot I'm seeing the following regarding passthrough:

method invocation failed: pcipassthrough->start() failed: error while executing the cli

Does anybody know what's going on? This is really frustrating. I've been struggling with it for hours.

 

[weust]

Haven't had this with my installation on a T320. Passed through the IT flashed PERC H310 and one of the two NICs from a dual-port 520.
Has survived several reboots since it's not on 24/7 yet.

 

[AveryFreeman]

Yeah it was an issue on one machine (but not another) with a new installation from the 6.7 ISO - for those I went back to a 6.5U2 slipstream ISO I had, installed that, turned on autoPartition and then updated to 6.7 using esxcli - resulting USB drive works great (24/7 for a few days with a couple passthrough devices).

Now I'm having an issue on another machine where the HBA keeps getting error messages to the point where it's slowing the system down to intermittent unresponsiveness. The settings survive reboots though!