Enabling the serial console for ESXi on Fujitsu PRIMERGY

If you can't boot ESXi for some reason, or have some firmware/driver issues when booting ESXi, you can enable the serial line output via iRMC on Fujitsu PRIMERGY servers.

Here is how to enable the serial output through iRMC, and capture ESXi boot logs.

1. Enable BIOS Console Redirection under Console Redirection.
You can do this in the BIOS setup menu (hit the F2 key during BIOS POST), or on the iRMC Web GUI.

Here is the example of iRMC. Check the Console Redirection Enabled option, and change the Serial 1 Multiplexer option from System to iRMC.

2. Enable IPMI over LAN under Network Settings if it is not enabled.

3. Activate Serial-Over-LAN through iRMC.
In this example, I use the ipmitool command, but you can use ipmiutil or other IPMI utilities which support SOL.

$ ipmitool -I lanplus -H <iRMC IP address> -U <iRMC User> -P <iRMC Password> sol activate

Example)

$ ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.10.77 -U admin -P admin sol activate

4. Boot the ESXi with the console options enabled.
You can see how to enable the console options for ESXi on VMware KB 1033888. In the following screenshot, I added the options to the boot options during startup (SHIFT+O).


Now you can see the ESXi boot log on your IPMI SOL session.