Nexus 9000v Boot

[chris-lawrence]

Team,

I am having a heck of a time trying to load and run the NX-OS 9000v. I know about the serial configuration. I'm trying to eventually get to the "leaving grub land" but I never get anywhere near it. And yes I know about the loader > and can run a "dir" to see my bin file and load it. The issue is, I get to Boot Time 3/18/2023 <timestamp> and nothing else happens.

I'm tried both nexus9300v.9.3.11.ova and nexus9300v64.10.2.5.M.ova and the both result in the same - showing me Boot Time and nothing else. See the attachment.

I'm using a stand alone ESXi with just using the web access on

localhost.localdomain

Version:6.7.0 Update 3 (Build 15160138)

State:Normal (not connected to any vCenter Server)

Uptime: 25.36 days

I just don't understand it... I follow the directions using EFI as the boot option, set the efi.serialconsole.enabled, and configured the serial port to match the hypervisor's address and a port and ensure that the firewall is allowing the serial (To connect to the switch you need to open a terminal and enter the telnet <esxi host> <port number>). My hardware is somewhat new and I have used it for other systems  (like vISE)... so I am unsure why I cannot get this going.

Manufacturer Dell Inc.

Model PowerEdge R630

CPU 20 CPUs x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2640 v4 @ 2.40GHz

Memory 63.91 GB

Anybody else get this and know how to get around it? Sure I'm not running vCenter and am using the onboard web client but I've used it like this before for all sorts of vm's and it never stopped me.

[Lebowski1991 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Based on your post  it would seem to me that you might have read the main deployment and tshoot articles available but jut to be sure, it would seem the following article is referring to your issue:
Cisco Nexus 9000v (9300v/9500v) Guide, Release 9.3(x) - Troubleshooting the Cisco Nexus 9000v [Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches] - Cisco

Did you have a look?


"

Bootup logs not seen after VGA output

A common problem during ESXi bootup is that the VGA console displays output similar to the following:

Sysconf checksum failed. Using default values
console (dumb)

Booting nxos.9.3.2.6.bin...
Booting nxos.9.3.2.bin
Trying diskboot
 Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
Image valid


Image Signature verification for Nexus9000v is not performed.

Boot Time: 12/5/2019 10:38:41

The issue is that, in the VGA console, there's no following activity in the bootup process. It's often misunderstood as a switch bootup process hang. To see the output of a switch bootup, connect to the provisioned serial console based on steps provided in the ESXi hypervisor deployment guide.

If nothing happens in the serial console, or you see the "telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused" error message, it indicates one or more of the following issues:

• The serial console provisioning is incorrect in the VM configuration. Read and follow the instructions for serial console connectivity in the ESXi deployment guide.

• ESXi 6.5 or higher deployment is supported. Make sure that you have a valid license for ESXi vCenter and a valid UCS server license.

• Make sure that the "Security Profile" in the server has "VM serial port connected over network", both for incoming connections and outgoing connections.

"

One thing you didn't mention in your post is configuring security profile.

Let me know if this helps.
If not, I'll try and get some time tonight to spin up v9000 and let you know if I hit similar issues and share my configs.

[chris-lawrence · Accepted solution]

Hi Lebowski1991

Yes I did have a look at this... when I received the Boot Time 3/18/2023 <timestamp> I thought that the switch was stuck. It wasn't until I noticed somewhere that this was normal for the version I am using. I wouldn't see the "leaving grub land" that I was expecting - I guess this was so for an earlier version of the NX-OSv platform.

For other's benefit who may see this post:

In any case, I found a video and followed someone suggestion that I needed to add and efi.serialconsole value to TRUE for this to properly work. During testing, I found that this was not so - After building the NX-OSv device, I simply ensured I was using "EFI" for the boot option and simply added the serial link with the "telnet://<ip address of my standalone esxi>:<port number of my choosing> and I was able to connect to my NX-OSv switch with a putty session to my port number. Of course the VMWare security and such was also addressed which is well documented so that was working fine. 

At the end of the day - I have a 10 node N9K test bed operating on my standalone ESXi test bed with 6 TinyCore Linux nodes (also vm's) just for some VXLAN (q-in-vni) testing. Of course going to move my configurations to hardware.

Thanks for your note - Chris