While creating a deployment script for ESX using UDA (Ultimate Deployment Appliance) I found something pretty annoying which took some time before I figured it out. While creating my post script, I thought to create it in the /tmp folder. Since the /tmp directory is IMHO just a temp directory I figured that it would be the best place. Also, because I had to install 32 ESX hosts, I had no plans to do this manually. 🙂
Anyhow, In this script I would create just the VMkernel port for VMotion. The script would be run only once during the first boot. But somehow it didn’t run. After googleing and searching forums I finally found this article from VMware:
User-created files in the ESX /tmp directory are deleted with each host reboot
If you or the users you support store temporary files, such as application-generated log files, in the ESX/tmp
directory, you will lose these files each time the host reboots.Workaround: Do not use the ESX
/tmp
directory to store user-generated files and directories.
So… for some reason the VMware team “decided” to clear out the /tmp directory. Don’t know why though. However, after changing the path it worked flawlessly. 🙂 I don’t know if this will be fixed in the future but I do know this is something to watch for. During some searches, I noticed it worked in previous versions of ESX, however I don’t have any experience with that. Anyhow, sometimes I shouldn’t be lazy and just read the release notes. Even if they are huge. 🙂