Simultaneous access to multiple ESXi installations on different drives causes the system to display panic messages

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

If you boot a system that has access to multiple installations of ESXi with the same build number on different drives, the system displays panic messages, such as:

The system has found a problem on your machine and cannot continue.

Two filesystems with the same UUID have been detected. Make sure you do not have two ESXi installations.

Environment

VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7

Resolution

To resolve this issue, you can detach all but one of the drives that have ESXi installations and reboot the system. In this case, the disks you detach must be wiped before they can be used.

 

Alternatively:

1. During the system bootup, when the ESXi installer window appears, press Shift+O to edit boot options.
2. At the prompt, type overrideDuplicateImageDetection to set the boot option.
3. Make sure that the host is set to boot from the disk that has the correct ESXi installation.
4. After the host boots successfully, wipe the disks that have the incorrect ESXi installation.