I've tried both ways. DHCP is handled by my wireless router. I've assigned a specific IP address for the MAC address of the network card that the management interface is tied to. In both cases, I've used the same set of IP addresses for the management interface, gateway, and DNS server and the results are the same.
Last night I installed ESXi 5.1 under VMware Workstation 8 on my desktop computer to see if I would get the same results. I did a straight forward install using the default DHCP configuration. ESXi installed fine under the virtual machine and was assigned an IP address by my router. I then used vSphere Client to connect to that IP address and I got the same certificate warning which I ignored but then I was logged in and could see the host. So without making any changes to the default DHCP assigned values, everything worked.
I decided to remove the static address assignment from the DHCP server for my actual server and once again re-installed ESXi 5.1 on the physical server. After the reboot from the install, I could see that the physical server had been assigned a different IP address from the DHCP address pool. I tried to connect vSphere Client to the assigned IP address and got the same 503 Server Unavailable / 503 Service Unavailable error messages. I compared the IP addresses between the physical server and the virtual server and they are identical with the exception of the IP addresses assigned to the management interfaces.
Today I checked to see if my motherboard had any BIOS updates and there were. I downloaded the latest BIOS firmware and it installed it. I also re-installed ESXi host one more time and got the exact same error messages.
I don't think it's network related at least in terms of infrastructure as the virtual machine was able to work on the very first attempt without a single change to the post-install setup. I think it is related specifically to the computer I am trying to install ESXi 5.1 on but I don't know what the issue could be. It installs fine to the hard drive. I can access the host via SSH. It recognizes all the memory installed in the machine. It recognizes the processor. It doesn't complain about any issues during the install. It even appears to boot without incident to the black and orage display.
It looks like to me the hostd service just fails to start. I looked through /var/log/syslog.log between the two ESXi installs to see if I see why one doesn't work and why the other one does. Nothing really stands out to me but at the same time I'm not exactly sure what I am looking for. I did check the area where hostd starts and I found this:
2013-01-01T16:40:56Z watchdog-hostd: [5091] Begin 'hostd ++min=0,swapscope=system,group=hostd /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml', min-uptime = 60, max-quick-failures = 1, max-total-failures = 1000000, bg_pid_file = ''2013-01-01T16:40:56Z watchdog-hostd: Executing 'hostd ++min=0,swapscope=system,group=host/vim/vmvisor/hostd /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml'2013-01-01T16:40:56Z watchdog-hostd: 'hostd ++min=0,swapscope=system,group=host/vim/vmvisor/hostd /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml' exited after 0 seconds (quick failure 1) 127
In both installs, the first two lines were identical except for the date/time/process ID. The difference is that the on the install that gives me the 503 errors, it shows that hostd exited after 0 seconds with "quick failure 1 127". On the install that hostd fails to start I also noticed that vpxa also fails to start with this error message:
2013-01-01T16:41:12Z watchdog-vpxa: [5419] Begin '/usr/lib/vmware/vpxa/bin/vpxa ++min=0,swapscope=system,group=vpxa -D /etc/vmware/vpxa', min-uptime = 60, max-quick-failures = 1, max-total-failures = 1000000, bg_pid_file = ''
2013-01-01T16:41:12Z watchdog-vpxa: Executing '/usr/lib/vmware/vpxa/bin/vpxa ++min=0,swapscope=system,group=host/vim/vmvisor/vpxa -D /etc/vmware/vpxa'
2013-01-01T16:41:12Z watchdog-vpxa: '/usr/lib/vmware/vpxa/bin/vpxa ++min=0,swapscope=system,group=host/vim/vmvisor/vpxa -D /etc/vmware/vpxa' exited after 0 seconds (quick failure 1) 139
2013-01-01T16:41:12Z watchdog-vpxa: Executing '/usr/lib/vmware/vpxa/bin/vpxa ++min=0,swapscope=system,group=host/vim/vmvisor/vpxa -D /etc/vmware/vpxa'
2013-01-01T16:41:13Z watchdog-vpxa: '/usr/lib/vmware/vpxa/bin/vpxa ++min=0,swapscope=system,group=host/vim/vmvisor/vpxa -D /etc/vmware/vpxa' exited after 1 seconds (quick failure 2) 139
2013-01-01T16:41:13Z watchdog-vpxa: End '/usr/lib/vmware/vpxa/bin/vpxa ++min=0,swapscope=system,group=vpxa -D /etc/vmware/vpxa', failure limit reached
2013-01-01T16:41:22Z watchdog-vpxa: Unable to verify vpxa started after 10 seconds
I'm guessing that they are related some how but I am not sure what the relationship is between these two processes/services.
Is there any way to increase the logging information around the hostd or vpxa to see if they may say why they exit? I have tried searching to see what the 127 and 139 numbers reported in the log file might mean but haven't found anything.
Thanks.