I have been using the Cisco Catalyst 9800-CL (Wireless Controller for cloud) for a while now. Recently, I accidentally powered off the wrong VMWare server, resulting in a wireless disruption. Priority 1 at home! And of course, just before I had a session with Shawn preparing for CiscoLive Barcelona…
After restarting the vSphere server, my C9800-CL wasn’t booting up, with a message: “GRUB Loading stage2… ” And it just sat there, for minutes.. Eventually, during the WebEx Call, I managed to fix it and got my controller back up and running.
Steps to fix the issue
First, power off the VM in vSphere. We need to change some settings in the BIOS.
Next, go and select “Edit Settings” of your VM and click “VM Options” at the top to view some advanced settings and click “Boot options” open. Change the Boot delay to “8000” milliseconds, so that you have enough time when you boot the VM.
Hit Save after you have changed the settings.
Just to make sure, open the settings of the VM again, and click open the first CD/DVD Drive. Check that there is an image named “_deviceImage-0.iso” and that it is connected at powerup.
When I used the vCenter convertor to move the VM off to a new server, I found that this iso wasn’t copied with the controller and it is needed.
Hit Save when you know the ISO image is there.
Follow the next steps to get the C9800-CL booting up again
- Open up the console of the VM in the browser (it saves you time)
- Power on the VM
- Once the Bios is shown, click in the console and hit “ESC“
- The boot order menu is shown, like the image on the left
- Scroll down to highlight “CD-ROM Drive”
- And hit “Enter“
- Now the VM will boot normally and your controller will start as expected.
Summary
It seems that Grub (the bootloader on the first disk) is not configured correctly the C9800-CL, which leads to a VM / Appliance that is not booted because it cannot find any kernel to load. By selecting the CD image, the right bootloader is selected and the controller is started with the correct configuration.
I do assume this is a caveat/bug in the Cloud version and will be fixed in a newer release. I do hope you can use this info to fix your C9800-CL deployment sooner.