Quick boot via PowerCLI on HPE Proliants

[nkretschmar]

Hi folks,

just wondering, if there is any way to initiate a host reboot, utilizing the ESX quick boot feature, of course via PowerCLI or another programatic call.

Regards,

Nico

References

Understanding ESXi Quick Boot Compatibility (52477) (vmware.com)

Document - Notice: (Revision) VMware - vSphere Quick Boot Hardware Support for HPE ProLiant Gen9/Gen...

[LucD]

Afaik as I know Quick Boot is a feature for use by VUM, not sure what would be the advantage for a user calling this directly.

From the Dell  Quick Boot on Dell PowerEdge servers whitepaper you can use it on a standalone ESXi node (see section 5.3).
It would require sending those commands via for example an SSH session to the ESXi node.

I assume that the same procedure should also work for an HPE platform, provided it supports Quick Boot.

[nkretschmar · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the great resource. And it clarifies how the quick boot works internally. It just a bypass to the hardware boot and it seems to reboot only the kernel and its modules.

Apart from patching, I had to change a setting of a driver module on a longer list of hosts, which required a reboot.

Anyway, I was only interested if there is a way to initiate it out of band and it seems it is more a preparation rather than an initiating the quick boot by using following cheating (taken from the provided document)

# Check the quick boot support
/usr/lib/vmware/loadesx/bin/loadESXCheckCompat.py

# Enable the quick boot
/bin/loadESXEnable -e

# Prepare the quick boot
/usr/lib/vmware/loadesx/bin/loadESX.py

# Reboot with standard tools like DCUI, ESXi shell, vSphere...
...

# Verify the result of the quick boot
cat /scratch/vmware/loadESX/loadESX.stats

PS: @LucD Is there an attribute to show at least the Quick Support of certain hosts?

[LucD · Accepted solution]

You can check if an ESXi node supports QuickBoot (not if it is enabled) with

Get-VMHost |
Select Name,@{N='QuickBoot';E={$_.ExtensionData.Capability.quickBootSupported}}