I recently shared my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Mini Rack build, which includes the use of a tiny 7" LCD screen for direct console access to the ESX hosts. Since the LCD is optimizing for the 10" inch rack, it is also using a non-standard resolution of 1280x400, which can make the output pretty compressed as you can see from the ESX DCUI screen.
This is definitely a niche use case, but I was curious if we had any workarounds that could be used to improve the screen resolution, especially handling large amounts of text when going into the ESX Shell 🤔
While there is not a way to for a specific screen resolution as this is dynamically calculated, we do have an ESX Kernel option that can be used to scale down the output.
To do so, run the following ESXCLI command:
esxcli system settings kernel set -s SVGAScaling -v 2
Once rebooted, we can see the ESX DCUI output has significant improved from both a readability and usability standpoint.
If we drop into the ESX Shell, we can also see interactive commands are legible, which was the biggest concern I had if I needed to perform some interactive command but the text prior was pretty difficult to read.
If you ever find yourself needing to view the ESX DCUI/Console on a small display, this is definitely a good workaround to be aware of!
Thanks for the comment!