After upgrading to ESXI 7.0 update 2 , the reboot process is Extremely slow boot

On one of my clusters (with over 30 hosts) it took literally six and half hours for one host to get back online. Furthermore they never return to vCenter. Status was Disconnected. I had to manually click on Connection -> connect.

The booting process stuck on vmw_vaaip_symm loaded successfully

On the small cluster it was not noticeable as time for hosts to get back to vCenter was about 40 minutes and they successfully connected to vCenter.

It appears that during upgrade from 6.5 or 6.7 to 7.0 update 2 boot.cfg is being deleted from the partition altbootbank, causing prolonged boot process.

As for the time I am writing this article VMware has resolution, however there is a workaround or even two!

First workaround

If you have not start upgrade process yet, consider two step upgrade:

  1. Upgrade to ESXi 7.0GA
  2. Patch to ESXi 70u2

Second workaround

  1. Copy boot.cfg from the bootbank location to altbootbank
cp /bootbank/boot.cfg /altbootbank/boot.cfg
  1. Change the bootstate  in the /altbootbank/boot.cfg, normally speaking this would from 0  (/bootbank/boot.cfg) to 3 (/altbootbank/boot.cfg)
bootstate=3                                            <<<=== bootstate changed to 3
title=
timeout=5
prefix=
kernel=b.b00

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