A Few Questions Regarding Esxi BIOS vs UEFI Boot.

[TheCRV]

Hello,

I am currently a Software Engineering student and I also maintain a small Windows network at my family's company. I am looking to build a white box server for home use, in order to better understand ESXi and Linux.

I have been studying Supermicro's webpage for quite some time now, and I have noticed that the overwhelming majority of their latest server boards (X11) are not certified for booting ESXi from UEFI. Almost all of their boards are certified for booting ESXi from BIOS, however.

My questions:

1. Is UEFI ESXi booting important for a new (as in modern) server?
2. Is it possible that their latest X11 motherboards which are only certified for ESXi BIOS boot could also be booted in UEFI without problems? I am thinking that Supermicro did not want to go through the trouble of certifying certain boards, based on their use case.
3. Is it possible to boot a ESXi UEFI certified board into ESXi BIOS without problems?
4. Are there any differences in device passthrough between ESXi BIOS boot and UEFI?

All of the above questions are assuming a new install of ESXi on the server.

As you can tell, I am a total noob to ESXi. I would really appreciate your help.

Thanks in advance.

[DavoudTeimouri]

You can find that the hardware is compatible with ESXi on the below link:

VMware Compatibility Guide - System Search

UEFI has SecureBoot feature and as I know there is no other.

[NathanosBlightc]

Remember the following points as the VMware also mentioned some of them in the KB2109712:

1. There is no especial offer by UEFI for ESXi boot operation except the Secure Boot feature

2. After release of version 6.0 vSphere supports booting ESXi hosts from the UEFI.

3. Provisioning with VMware Auto Deploy requires the legacy BIOS firmware and is not available with UEFI BIOS configurations (in ver6.0) so you can boot from network, CD-ROM & USB drives.

4. Changing the host boot type between legacy BIOS and UEFI is not supported after you install ESXi (in ver6.0)