Ubuntu 16.04 VM (from .ova file) hangs at “non blocking pool is initialized” during booting

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Upgrading the hardware to higher version (such as 11,13,14) and then rebooting virtual machine hangs at non blocking pool is initialized during booting.

Note: The default hardware version is 10 when you are deploying ubuntu-16.04-server-cloudimg-i386 / x86_64.ova in ESXi.

Environment

• VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
• VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0

Cause

This issue occurs because the grub configuration is trying to use a serial port, but when it is not there, it fails to handle this gracefully. So, either add a serial port or change grub not to require it.

Default serial ports not visible after upgrading hardware version to 11 or later is expected behavior.

Resolution

To add serial port to virtual machine:

1. Power off the virtual machine.
2. Edit virtual machine setting.
3. Add serial port.