With UEFI, you can boot systems from hard drives, CD-ROM drives, USB media, or network. VSphere 5.0 and above supports booting ESXi hosts from the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). Note: Modern systems are only emulating the legacy BIOS. It supports MBR and GPT partition types.UEFI can work alongside BIOS. It can sit on top of BIOS and work independently.UEFI can perform better while initializing the hardware devices.This is especially the case when large hard drives are in use. Since UEFI is platform independent, it may be able to enhance the boot time and speed of the computer.Flexible pre-OS environment, including network capability.Ability to boot from large disks (over 2 TB) with a GUID Partition Table (GPT).UEFI firmware provides several technical advantages over a traditional BIOS system: The EFI specification is portable, and implementations may be capable of running on platforms other than PCs.įor more information, see the Wikipedia page for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. It is intended as an extensible successor to the PC BIOS, which has been extended and enhanced in a relatively unstructured way since its introduction. An implementation of EFI, stored in ROM or Flash RAM, provides the first instructions used by the CPU to initialize hardware and pass control to an operating system or bootloader. Originally called Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), the more recent specification is known as Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), and the two names are used interchangeably.ĮFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) is a specification for a new generation of system firmware. For further information about VM UEFI look at. This blog post is about ESXi boot mode however just for completeness I would like to mention that VMware Virtual Machine with at least hardware version 7 supports UEFI as well. Virtual Machine running on top of ESXi hypervisor.physical server booting ESXi hypervisor or.UEFI replaces the the old Basic Input/Output System (BIOS). The effort to address these concerns began in 1998 and was initially called Intel Boot Initiative later renamed to EFI. In July 2005, Intel ceased its development of the EFI specification at version 1.10, and contributed it to the Unified EFI Forum, which has evolved the specification as the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). However, there must be some limitations in 30 years old technology, isn't it?īIOS limitations (such as 16-bit processor mode, 1 MB addressable space and PC AT hardware) had become too restrictive for the larger server platforms.

It is unbelievable that we are still using the same concept after more then 30 years. The concept of MBRs was publicly introduced in 1983 with PC DOS 2.0. Legacy BIOS bootstrapping along with a master boot record (MBR) is uses with x86 compatible systems for ages.

Vmware esxi 5 slic bios