Problem

Upon a fresh install of FTDv (6.2.3) on VMWare ESXi, the FTD console reports the following error over and over and over:

Jul  2 15:22:58 ciscoasa init: Id "ftd1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

Some poking around in expert mode points to a misconfigured serial port (Or, in my case, not configured at all) 

sudo cat /etc/inittab
ftd1:5:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L 9600 ttyS0 vt100

Solution

Power down the VM and add a serial port to the configuration. You want to the new serial port to map to “use output file”. After booting up, no more “respawning too fast” error messages were observed.