We had some issues on our 'old' ESX servers. The initrd.img file was corrupted and the filesize was 0. Now, we resolved this by starting in Debug-Mode and copied a correct initrd.img file from an other ESX server and run the following commands just to be sure:

• esxcfg-boot -p
• esxcfg-boot -b
• esxcfg-boot -r

Check this KB for more info (thanks Marvin).

The other thing I wanted to check is how do we know if my ESX server is running in debug mode at the moment? Well I looked in the file: "# cat /proc/vmware/version"

The top line on a server in debug-mode says:

VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 [BETAbuild-62090], built on Oct 29 2007

The top line on a server in normal mode says:

VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 [Releasebuild-62090], built on Oct 29 2007

Nice huh? Now, it is not recommended to keep your server running in debug mode since it log more information causing some more overhead. But it shouldn't give any problems...