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Troubleshooting ESXi Shutting down firmware services and UEFI Runtime Services (RTS) error message

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Several months back, I was helping a customer debug an issue where I needed to install the GA release of ESXi 6.7! Yikes, it certainly has been a minute since I have installed anything older than 7.x but I figured it should still work fine with recent hardware like an Intel NUC systems, right?

After the ESXi installer started to boot up, it eventually halted with the following message:

Shutting down firmware services...

Using 'simple offset' UEFI RTS mapping policy


I decided to give it one more go by using a more recent release of ESXi 6.7 Update 3 and to my surprise, not only did ESXi installed perfectly fine but I did not run into the error message shown abvove!

I then realized that perhaps this has something to do with the ESXi bootloader, like any piece of software, there are fixes and enhancements with newer releases. I also recall a conversation with one of our Engineers that the ESXi bootloader is also designed to be backwards compatible, so that gave me an idea to try replacing the default ESXi 6.7 GA bootloader files with the ones found in ESXi 6.7 Update 3 and now I was able to install ESXi 6.7 GA release!

However, my success did not last very long as I ran into a slightly different message after the initial reboot:

Shutting down firmware services…

UEFI runtime services support is disabled

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Nested ESXi installation using HTTPS boot over VirtualEFI in vSphere 8

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In vSphere 7.0 Update 2, an enhancement was made to the Virtual Machine's UEFI firmware called VirtualEFI that would enable ESXi to run in a VM (Nested ESXi) and perform an HTTP Boot given the ESXi bootloader URL without requiring any traditional PXE infrastructure.

This was especially useful for anyone testing or developing ESXi automation for use with ESXi Kickstart, where you can quickly prototype your automation without additional infrastructure dependencies and once the automation has been vetted, you can then leverage that exact same automation in your physical ESXi provisioning infrastructure.

The original solution had only supported HTTP and I recently came to learn that we can now also support HTTPS in vSphere 8!

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Simplified Nested ESXi installation in ESXi 7.0 Update 2 using HTTP Boot over VirtualEFI

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Deploying an ESXi scripted installation aka Kickstart running within a VM (Nested ESXi) has a number of benefits, especially for testing and development purposes. This was something I did regularly as a customer, especially with new releases of ESXi to ensure our existing automation scripts and processes continued to work before rolling out into production. ESXi kickstart itself is pretty straight forward, but the required supporting infrastructure (PXE Server, DHCP, TFTP, etc) that needs to be configured, especially for a greenfield deployment can often be challenging for new comers.

Even with an existing PXE infrastructure, it can often be difficult to configure or troubleshoot depending on your level of access which does not add any value in actually testing or automating the ESXi scripted installation process. In ESXi 7.0 Update 2, an enhancement was made to the Virtual Machine's UEFI firmware called VirtualEFI that would enable ESXi to perform an HTTP Boot given the ESXi bootloader URL and without requiring any of the traditional PXE infrastructure.

To take advantage of this new capability, you just need to have a physical server running ESXi 7.0 Update 2 and a VM that is configured with the latest vHW19 compatibility. To configure HTTP boot, you will need to add the following two VM Advanced Settings:

  • networkBootProtocol - httpv4 or httpv6
  • networkBootUri - HTTP URL to the ESXi bootloader (bootx64.efi)

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware

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