Installation hangs on ESX VM

[pax109]

Hi,

I'm attempting to install OpenVMS 9.2.1 on a ESX 7.0 U3 guest and have been unable to boot into the actual installer.

Physical server is a Dell R520, I've run the CPU check script and it passed with the following results;
OpenVMS 9.x compatibility quick-check

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Summary:
Your CPU appears to be compatible with OpenVMS 9.2 and up.

Detailed info:

Vendor ID : GenuineIntel
CPU name  : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2470 v2 @ 2.40GHz

Necessary for OpenVMS 9.x:
Intel or AMD CPU : Yes
SSE 4.1          : Yes
XSAVE            : Yes
TSC              : Yes
APIC             : Yes
MTRR             : Yes

Optional for OpenVMS 9.x:
PCID             : Yes
X2APIC           : Yes
FSGSBASE         : Yes
MD_CLEAR         : Yes
XSAVEOPT         : --

Every attempt to boot the installer hangs at the following;

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Booting...
%VMS_BOOTMGR-I-INSTALL, Booting an OpenVMS Installation Kit...
100%

%%%%%%%%%%% VSI OpenVMS (tm) x86-64 %%%%%%%%%%%


_______________________________________________

      GRAPHICAL OUTPUT HAS BEEN SUSPENDED
      USE A TERMINAL UTILITY FOR ACCESS
_______________________________________________

VSI Primary Kernel SYSBOOT May 16 2023 13:21:17

%SYSBOOT-I-VMTYPE, Booting as a VMware (tm) Guest


        VMS Software, Inc. OpenVMS (TM) x86_64 Operating System, V9.2-1
                    Copyright 2023 VMS Software, Inc.

  MDS Mitigation active, variant verw(MD_CLEAR)

%SMP-I-CPUTRN, CPU #1 has joined the active set.

Turning on verbose boot mode the lat few lines are this;

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%SYSINIT-I-TIME, setting the system time
%SYSINIT-I-SYSDISK, checking status of system disk
%SYSINIT-I-STACONFIG, STACONFIG finished
%SYSINIT-I-INIT, initializing the XQP
%SYSINIT-I-CLUSTER, cluster/lock manager initialization
%SYSINIT-I-SHADOW, shadow driver initialization
%SYSINIT-I-DEFINE, defining system logical names
%SYSINIT-I-MOUNT, mounting the system disk
%SYSINIT-I-TIME, setting the system time
%SYSINIT-I-FILCACHE, deallocating the primitive file cache
%SYSINIT-I-DEFINE, defining SYS$TOPSYS
%SYSINIT-I-MEMCONNECTING, connecting to memory disk
%SYSINIT-I-MEMCONNECTED, connected to memory disk
%SYSINIT-I-MEMDISK, using device LDM8163:
%SYSINIT-I-CREPRC, creating the STARTUP process
%SYSINIT-I-FINISH, SYSINIT process execution completed

I've been trying various guest settings for weeks but always the same result, any help in resolving this would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Shane.

[hb]

Usually, the next thing that happens after the last SYSINIT message is that the startup procedure runs.

You can get some output from this procedure by setting STARTUP_P2 to "V". That is, you need to do a conversational boot.

If you do not get any output from the STARTUP procedure, you can try to boot into OPA0. That is, using SET/STARTUP OPA0:. However, it's unlikely that this will help if there is no output from the STARTUP process at all. It only proves that the STARTUP process was created and is runing DCL. If you get to the DCL prompt, you can manually run the startup procedure. In the conversational boot, do a SHOW/STARTUP before changing it for OPA0:. Then you will know, what to run at the DCL prompt.

Any further debugging of this problem will probably involve XDELTA. But that's beyond the scope of this forum.