


#ESXI INSTALLER FATAL ERROR 33 UPGRADE#
I recommend before you start, you upgrade the NUC to the latest firmware, to avoid any potential bugs (of which there were a few when they were first released).

The following are updated instructions for installing vSphere 5.5 on Intel NUC (any model with the Intel® 82579V or Intel® I218V onboard NIC should work). In addition I also purchased a 3rd node for my lab, the 4th Gen D34010WYKH model (also with a Core i3), with which I was able to test and prove the process on as it uses the same NIC chipset. Having written all of this up, I then promptly forgot to post it! So for the sake of continuity (before I do the same for 6.0 shortly), this article covers the process. I had experienced some issues with my vCenter Server Appliance so ended up just rebuilding the lab from scratch and reattaching my old data stores. Early this year I got around to upgrading to 5.5. I successfully ran my VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1 Nanolab for 18 months on my pair of Intel NUC DC3217IYE hosts.

Since doing this I have not seen any further issues with the corruptions. These keep the USB stick indirectly attached to the NUC chassis, and as such the heat does not transfer into the flash drive. I purchased a number of 12cm (5 inch) USB 2.0 extender cables on eBay for just 99p each (including delivery!). You don’t actually see the symptom / failure until a reboot because the ESXi image actually runs in memory, so is only loaded from the USB stick at boot time.Īs for the solution, it’s really quite simple. Having pulled a USB out from a recently shut down node, they are really quite hot to the touch. The NUC case can become quite warm during normal operation with or without the fans spinning up, and I have come to believe that the main reason for the corruptions is that the USB stick itself is getting too hot and therefore eventually failing. I have often managed to recover the stick by copying back corrupted files from another instance, but generally I needed to rebuild and restore the image. The error only occurs when you reboot the host, and the startup bombs out at the start of the hypervisor launch. These are not cheap and nasty, or freebie USB drives, so I would not normally expect to see this rate of failures. In that time I have unfortunately seen more than my fair share of USB drive failures and corruptions, generally with an error which looks something like this: Error loading /k.b00 I have been running a variety of Intel NUC nodes in my vSphere homelab over the past 3 years now, including the D34010WYKH, DC3217IYE & DC53427HYE.
