I suppose you're using the DHCP-server from EDA and that there is no other DHCP server on your network?
In my opinion it has something to do with the network, was is not doing correctly somewhere, as far as I can imagine.
You can try to put a cross-cable between the host with the EDA applicance and the host you want to install. Make a seperate vSwitch only connected to the physical NIC with the crosscable connected and put the other end into the first NIC of the host you want to install and try again (if that is possible ofcourse) and see what happens then. Untill now all the problems I did have are my own fault. The appliance did work fine ofcourse no garanty 
).
Good luck with trying.
DHCP server I am running on EDA. I have DHCP running on windows environment. But it has WDS/MDT configured for it. So I created separate VLAN for this testing purpose. This VLAN has only MDT and test ESX host. It get DHCP IP fine. I don’t have luxury to use cross over cable 
because I am 4000 miles away and I am the only one who knows can make it work if all it will work
Hmm still not the time to give up Maybe you can post here your ks-config file outpout without personal data or "xxx" within it or do an attachment to find errors in the config and then do some more tries.
Is there no bios information from your intel network cards shown during starting the server to step into the bios from these cards, may be some like press "strg + q".
Regards
1: there's no point in adding stuff after the EOF2. everything in the input box is what gets executed after the first reboot. all stuff before and after it are just to get it to work. if you need a reboot after the script has run, add 'shutdown -t 60 +3 -r &' at the end of the input box. this will initiate a reboot in 3 minutes which should be plenty of time for any scripts that run after the installscript has finished.
2: there's a logfile in /tmp called esxcfg.txt or something. it usually shows exactly what commands went wrong. just 'cat' or 'less' it to view it.
3: thank you
funtoosh,
i see that tom and vampire got you pointed in the right direction already. good to see people helping eachother!
you may be interested to know that you're not the first to have exactly this problem and that it is fixable this thread is getting too long to scan through it on the web so i captured the first 100 messages into a pdf file which makes a search so very much easier have a look at .
in short there are some basic rules when using VLANs with EDA (or any other pxe solution for that matter):
make sure the ESX ip addresses are in the SAME ip range as the EDA. very important, it will not work if they're on different subnets.
only if you can enter a VLAN tag in your BIOS for pxe (like some dell machines can), can you use EDA on a tagged network. in all other cases, you HAVE to use native vlan tagging for pxe boot. that means that when EDA runs on a ESX server, you create a portgroup with no vlan tags and have the physical switches add the tag (called native in Cisco language). the service console portgroup can not be tagged either. if you absolutely cannot have an EDA in your service console network you need to add a second console vswif and remove the first, all from the script. this is possible because once the script starts, the ESX server is running and can be on another subnet than the EDA. we leave the EDA at our customers as a disaster recovery system (or even a quick upgrade system;)* upgrading to U4 by reinstalling it with EDA is much faster than a remediate
) and it's usually considered part of the management network wether it runs DHCP or not..
when installing an ESX server, the network gets initiated 3 times before the first reboot. unfortunately the NIC detection routines differ slightly which causes the network order to change. so when pxe starts, your first onboard nic could be considered eth0 while the second step sees it as eth1. in the EDA there's an option to specifically set the ksdevice. you could try changing that from eth0 to eth1 or higher and see if that helps
as for WDS, that's a very strange toolset from microsoft. even if the DHCP server points to something else, the WDS server still reponds to pxe and tftp queries. very annoying tool. i need to disable it most of the time before i can install my servers. even if i add the mac addresses of the hosts i'm installing as reservations in the dhcp scope, WDS keeps coming through.
Hi Herco,
1. I just found out something similair this afternoon (I'm not a linux guy so it takes some extra time ), but thanks.
2. Oke, I will have a look at it. Thanks again.
Grt.
Tom
OK! It's finaly there. the first patch for EDA.. go to http://virtualappliances.eu to get a quick step by step instruction on how to apply the patch. future patches will be much easier but this first one needs a quick file-edit unfortunately..
list of fixes:
- hostname entries with special formats are now accepted either per one or per many
- interface cleanup
- fs.php page includes automatic patching
- preliminary esx4 detection (doesn't fully install yet but at least it detects the version)
- scriptparts have been updated. it assumes 3.5 as default version but has some 3.0 scriptparts as well
are there any bugs or features that you guys desperatly need? i'm leaving for the states next saterday which means i have plenty of time to kill