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ViennaAustria
Contributor
Contributor

ESXi 5.x running in text mode (80x25 chars) ?

ESXi 5 is running some low-res graphics mode (for EFI compliance, I believe). We still have pretty old systems that do have problems with that. I'd like to put ESXi back into the old "DOS" text mode with 80 columns and 25 lines of pure text that it used back in the days of ESXi 3.5. That lower resolution would also speed up any remote console. Is that possible? How?

Thank you!!!

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2 Replies
corndog
Contributor
Contributor

I need this also.  Preferrably, I'd like to find out some boot option to add to the boot.cfg file to force the ESXi5.1 and 5.5 installer screens to stay in good old 80x24.  I have a few network KVM devices that are unable to display the ESXi5 install screens due to the weird graphics mode they change to.

Frustrating

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ViennaAustria
Contributor
Contributor

We have a server where we put an antique PCI graphics card into. When it boots, the screen goes dark after the BIOS initialisation. But after half a minute, when ESXi 5.5 is loaded and starts with is initialisation, the screen comes back - in 80x25 text mode. Obviously, this configuration is still possible. The question is, how to force it?

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