"No operating system was found" occurred when VM boot randomly

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0
• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

• VM failed to enter OS and hanging in boot screen.
• Retry to power on the same VM and result always succeed
• Below similar errors found in vmware.log:
  Guest: Status upon boot failure: No Media
Guest: Status upon boot failure: No Media
...
[msg.Backdoor.OsNotFound] No operating system was found. If you have an operating system installation disc, you can insert the disc into the system's CD-ROM drive and restart the virtual machine.

Environment

VMware vSphere 8.0

Cause

Cause is still under investigation

Resolution

Configure virtual machine options as below:

1. From the vSphere Client, right-click the master VM and go to Edit Settings.
2. Open VM Options tab
3. Configure as below under Boot Options section:
   Boot Delay: 3000 milliseconds
   Failed Boot Recovery: Checked
4. If the VM fails to find boot device, automatically retry after: leave as default value (10 seconds)

or

1. Edit vmx of VM to add below lines:
   bios.bootRetry.delay = "3000"
bios.bootRetry.enabled = "TRUE"
2. Reload the VMX

Additional Information

N/A