WilliamLam.com

Custom UEFI Boot Menu for ESXi 9.0 using rEFInd

by // 8 Comments

Unless I am working with an unreleased version of ESXi, I usually install it by booting from a USB drive that includes an embedded Kickstart configuration file, that will fully automate the installation.

For a single ESXi host deployment, this workflow works great but if you have more than one host with different ESXi Kickstart configuration files, you will either need multiple USB drives or you have to keep updating the embedded Kickstart file reference using a single USB device.

There are a number of different ways to solve this problem, I have covered many of the solutions in my Tech Deep Dive: Automating VMware ESXi Installation at Scale session at VMware Explore.

With that said, since I have been deploying several Minisforum MS-A2 for use with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9, I wanted to explore a solution that had been requested in the past but I never had the time to look into, which is creating a custom ESXi boot menu that would allow you to select specific ESXi version and/or kickstart configuration files.

[Read more...]

Quick Tip - Auditing ESXi boot firmware type

by // Leave a Comment

I had a customer that recently reached out asking how they could easily audit their entire ESXi infrastructure to determine which hosts was still booting using the legacy BIOS firmware, which has been deprecated and will be removed in a future vSphere release, in favor of the industry standard UEFI firmware type.

In vSphere 8.0 Update 2, a new vSphere API property called firmwareType was introduced and added to the ESXi Hardware BIOS info object that makes it very simple to retrieve with the following PowerCLI 1-Liner:

(Get-VMHost).ExtensionData.Hardware.BiosInfo

Here is an example output for an ESXi host booting with UEFI firmware:


Here is an example output for an ESXi host booting with BIOS firmware:


Since this vSphere API property was recently introduced in vSphere 8.0 Update 2, if you attempt to use this on an ESXi host that is not running 8.0 Update 2, then you will see the field being blank if you are using a newer release of PowerCLI that understands this new property or it will simply not show if you are using an older version of PowerCLI.


Alternatively, if you still need to retrieve this information, you can go directly to ESXi host via SSH, not ideal but you can use the following VSISH command to retrieve this exact information:

vsish -e get /hardware/firmwareType

Customizing SMBIOS strings (hardware manufacturer and vendor) for Nested ESXi 

by // 11 Comments

Nested ESXi continues to be an invaluable resource that I use on almost a daily basis from solution prototyping, customer reproduction to automated lab deployments supporting both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), the use cases are simply endless!

While you can do almost anything with Nested ESXi, mimicking or simulating specific hardware strings such as the manufacturer or vendor is not really possible or at least very easily. I was recently reminded of this topic again as this has been something I wanted to look into but just not had the time. In fact, some of this was inspired by a conversation I had with fellow colleague Luke Huckaba who found a clever trick playing with the default Virtual Machine boot ROMs which are shipped with both ESXi and our VMware Desktop Hypervisors (Workstation/Fusion).

[Read more...]