Relocating modules and starting up the kernel
normally indicates that the mboot
bootloader has successfully loaded the VMkernel and passed control to it. There can be other causes for an ESXi startup which fails at this point, however.Relocating modules and starting up the kernel
VMB: ACPIParseFADT:370: Headless mode is set.
VMB: TermInit:100: VGA not available, headless flag is set in ACPI FADT
cpu0:nnnnnnn)Keyboard: EarlyInit:187: keyboard disabled, headless flag is set in ACPI FADT
cpu0:nnnnnnn)PCI: Init:195: VGA not available, headless flag is set in ACPI FADT
Beginning with ESXi 5.5, the VMkernel supports installation on servers with no video display device, either local (physically attached monitor) or remote (ILO, DRAC, RSA, etc). Servers without video display are called headless servers.
If a server identifies itself as headless, the VMkernel does not initialize the local console terminal and it is expected that all interaction will be done via answer files or remotely via SSH or Serial connections. Servers identify themselves as headless by a flag in the Fixed ACPI Description Table, a set Prior versions of ESXi ignored this flag and always initialized the local console terminal.
Some systems which have a video display device can be configured to report themselves as headless via the configuration, usually in the system BIOS. For these systems, it is usually preferable to use a non-headless configuration.
If the server hardware platform has a display device, but claims to be headless in the ACPI configuration, and/or the server does not provide a way to configure it in the BIOS, use an advanced VMkernel boot-time configuration option to ignore the ACPI configuration and use the local console anyway.
ignoreHeadless=TRUE
esxcfg-advcfg -k TRUE ignoreHeadless