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Using ESXi Kickstart %firstboot with Secure Boot

06.26.2018 by William Lam // 6 Comments

If you install ESXi via a Kickstart script and make use of the %firstboot option to execute commands on the first boot of the ESXi host after installation, you should be aware of its incompatibility with the Secure Boot feature. If you install ESXi where Secure Boot is enabled, the Kickstart will install ESXi normally only execute up to the %post section. However, it will not execute the %firstboot scripts and if you look at the /var/log/kickstart.log after the host boots, you should see the following message:

INFO UEFI Secure Boot Enabled, skipping execution of /var/lib/vmware/firstboot/001.firstboot_001

If you have Secure Boot enabled, %firstboot is not supported. The reason for this is Secure Boot mandates only known tardisks which can hold executable scripts, and a kickstart script is an unknown source so it can not run when Secure Boot is enabled. If you wish to continue using %firstboot scripts, the only option is to disable Secure Boot and then re-enable it after the installation. A preferred alternative is to convert your %firstboot logic into an external script which can then be applied using the vSphere API (recommended method) and this way you can still customize your ESXi host after the initial installations. I have already filed an internal documentation bug to add a note regarding Secure Boot and %firstboot, hopefully that will roll out with the net documentation refresh.

Categories // ESXi, Security Tags // %firstboot, kickstart, Secure Boot, UEFI

Tip from Engineering - Use UEFI firmware for Windows 10 & Server 2016

10.20.2017 by William Lam // 15 Comments

Several weeks back I was chatting with a few of our Engineers from the Core Platform Team (vSphere) and they had shared an interesting tidbit which I thought I was worth mentioning to my readers. When creating a Virtual Machine in either vSphere or Fusion/Workstation, customers have the option to override the default and specify the specific Firmware boot option whether that is BIOS or UEFI.


Like most customers, I do not even bother touching this setting and I just assume the system defaults are sufficient. Interestingly, for Microsoft Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016, there are some important implications to be aware of on whether BIOS or UEFI is used. This is especially important since the default firmware type in vSphere for these OSes are BIOS.

UPDATE (01/07/21) - As of vSphere 6.7 Update 3, the default firmware for creating a Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 guest OS is now EFI

[Read more...]

Categories // Fusion, Security, Workstation Tags // Credential Guard, Device Guard, fusion, Secure Boot, UEFI, vSphere 6.5, windows 10, windows 2016

Quick Tip - How to create a Windows 2016 ISO supporting EFI boot w/o prompting to press a key

06.10.2016 by William Lam // 4 Comments

We had a question this week from a customer that was looking automate the installation of the latest Windows 2016 Tech Preview running on vSphere. They were booting the ISO using the EFI firmware and found that they would always be prompted with the "Press any key to boot from CD or DVD ...." message as shown in the screenshot below.

boot-windows-2016-using-efi-without-prompting-0
This obviously was not ideal from an Automation standpoint and they were looking to see if there was a solution. Thanks to one of our EFI experts at VMware, Darius Davis, who noted that this has been a known Microsoft issue for some time now and there is even a TechNet article here describing the issue since Windows Server 2008. The only workaround to solve this problem was to re-master the Windows ISO to use the efisys_noprompt.bin instead of the default efisys.bin file.

[Read more...]

Categories // vSphere Tags // UEFI, windows 10, windows 2016

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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