Vmware Firmware Type Bios Or Uefi
Tiffany Crutch
The nova compute libvirt driver does not support booting from UEFI images.This is a problem because there is a slow but steady trend for OSes to moveto the UEFI format and in some cases to make the UEFI format their onlyformat. Microsoft Windows is moving in this direction and Clear Linux isalready in this category. Given this, we propose enabling UEFI boot withthe libvirt driver. Additionally, we propose using the well tested andbattle hardened Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) as the VM firmwarefor x86_64.
Platform vendors have been increasingly adopting UEFI for the platform firmwareover traditional BIOS. This, in part, is leading to OS vendors also shifting tosupport or provide UEFI images. However, as adoption of UEFI for OS imagesincreases, it has become apparent that OpenStack through its Nova computeLibvirt driver, does not support UEFI image boot. This is problematic and needsto be resolved.
1. User wants to launch a VM with UEFI. In this case the user needs to be ableto tell Nova everything that is needed to launch the desired VM. The onlyadditional information that should be required is new image propertiesindicating which kind of firmware type will be used, uefi or bios.
Some minor additions for launching a UEFI image with Nova, note onextra config option and metadata property, Operator / installationinformation for the UEFI firmware. In addition, hypervisor supportmatrix should be also updated.
I was not aware of booting mode and installed ubuntu on my new x64,4 gb ram, Acer ES15 laptop in legacy mode. I read about the feature of uefi mode and would like to switch to uefi. When I boot on legacy mode, ubuntu loads up and system works fine, but when I change my bios setting to uefi it says no bootable device found. Should I install ubuntu again using uefi mode after erasing data? Will that work?.... Is there any other way to get to uefi mode or I need to format and then install ubuntu again using uefi bios mode? Please, help.
You can re-install Ubuntu, as Pilot6 suggests, and this may be acceptable if you haven't done much customization or created many user files in Ubuntu; however, it's pretty easy to install an EFI-mode boot loader for Linux. The two easiest methods are:
I thought you were dual-booting with Windows, but when I re-read your question, I didn't see this explicitly stated. If you're dual-booting with Windows, the above procedures should both work as-is. If you do not have a dual-boot with Windows, though, your computer may lack an EFI System Partition (ESP) and it may even use the Master Boot Record (MBR) partitioning system rather than the GUID Partition Table (GPT). If so, I recommend that you convert from MBR to GPT (if necessary), as described here. You will also need to create an ESP, which you can do with GParted using an emergency disk. You'll need to shrink an existing partition by about 550 MiB, create a new FAT32 partition in the freed space, and mark it ask an ESP by giving it a "boot" or "esp" flag (in GParted) or assigning it a type code of EF00 (in gdisk). Note that the MBR-to-GPT conversion will destroy the current BIOS-mode boot loader, so if something goes wrong and you have problems getting EFI-mode booting working, it will be harder to return to BIOS-mode booting.
If you successfully installed a Ubuntu OS on UEFI, but then the system fails to see it as a boot(able) device, chances are your BIOS is set to Legacy BIOS mode. Depending upon the BIOS, try switching to UEFI mode (or load Windows 8/10/11 defaults, which should also switch to UEFI mode, depending upon the mfg / BIOS menu options(.
Nested ESXi continues to be an invaluable resource that I use on almost a daily basis from solution prototyping, customer reproduction to automated lab deployments supporting both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), the use cases are simply endless!
While you can do almost anything with Nested ESXi, mimicking or simulating specific hardware strings such as the manufacturer or vendor is not really possible or at least very easily. I was recently reminded of this topic again as this has been something I wanted to look into but just not had the time. In fact, some of this was inspired by a conversation I had with fellow colleague Luke Huckaba who found a clever trick playing with the default Virtual Machine boot ROMs which are shipped with both ESXi and our VMware Desktop Hypervisors (Workstation/Fusion).
A vSphere VM can boot using either BIOS or EFI firmware, so depending on the desired firmware type, you will need to modify either the BIOS.440.ROM or EFI64.ROM ROM file. You can find these ROM files under the following directories for the respective VMware Hypervisors below:
Note: Do not edit the default ROM files that are shipped with the VMware Hypervisor, make a copy and then use the modified version which can be consumed by VMs across VMware vSphere, Fusion or Workstation. In addition, while this article is focused on Nested ESXi VM, this should also apply to other guest operating systems to display SMBIOS information.
Step 1 - Download and install the Phoenix BIOS Editor, which was actually quite difficult to find but I was able to locate a version at -bios-editor/. The installer for Phoenix BIOS Editor did run into issue while running it on a Windows Server 2019 system and the only way to get the installer to complete was to modify its application compatibility to Windows 8, which allowed it run through successfully.
Once you have finished making all your changes, go to the File menu and then click on the Build BIOS to create a new ROM file. In my example, I have named the file BIOS.440.CUSTOM.ROM.
Step 3 - Copy the new ROM file to the datastore of your physical ESXi host, which you can either save it in a common folder to be shared with multiple Nested ESXi VMs OR you can store it directly in the folder of an individual Nested ESXi VM. The latter would allow you to re-use the same custom ROM file across a number of VMs, so from a testing perspective, you might want to create several ROM files based on your needs and simply reconfigure the VM to use the desired ROM file.
Step 1 - Download and install a HEX Editor that can edit an EFI ROM file, I found ImHex to be a pretty user friendly from an editing perspective but locating certain strings was not as trivial using this tool.
Step 2 - Download and open the EFI64.ROM file using the ImHex editor and search for the string "VMware7,1". Once you have found the location of the matched string, you need to carefully edit the hex values to get the desired ASCII strings.
Alternatively, you can also use UEFITool (version 28 allows for rom modification) which has a much easier and functional search AND allows you to extract a subset of the ROM file for editing via a HEX Editor. I also used this method by first doing search (CTR+F) and once it identifies the section, double click on the result which will take you to exact section within the ROM file. To extract the section for editing, right click and select "Extract as is" and save the file to your desktop.
Once you have saved your changes, do not lose your spot in UEFITool and now we are simply going to replace the section with our modified file by right clicking and selecting "Replace as is" and providing the modified section. You can confirm your changes was successful before rebuilding your ROM file by simply searching for the string you had replaced and finally, go to File menu and select "Save image file"to create a new ROM file. In my example, I have named the file EFI64.CUSTOM.ROM.
Step 3 - Copy the new rom file to the datastore of your physical ESXi host, which you can either save it in a common folder to be shared with multiple Nested ESXi VMs OR you can store it directly in the folder of an individual Nested ESXi VM.
Note: While I was able to locate the "VMware, Inc." string for vendor, editing the value had no affect as demonstrated in the screenshot above, which probably indicates that this information may be stored elsewhere or contained in an embedded file ...
We have a 4 node (Esxi8) cluster using nested Esxi8 vm's hosted on a physical Esxi8 host with vsphere 8 (VCSA8) installed on workstation and did not have to modify any Rom's and they all boot using uefi. So why does one have to modify Rom's?
F.eks. Edge Cloud Orchestrator isn't too happy about the SN#'s that are created when running virtual ESXi hosts. So the ability to create more palatable serial numbers in the virtual BIOS/UEFI to be exposed to the physical ESXi host from the Nested ESXi Keswick hosts would be grand.
William is Senior Staff Solution Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. He focuses on Cloud Native, Automation, Integration and Operation for both VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) & VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) across Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud
This section describes the XML format used to represent domains, there arevariations on the format based on the kind of domains run and the options usedto launch them. For hypervisor specific details consult the driverdocs
The root element required for all virtual machines is named domain. It hastwo attributes, the type specifies the hypervisor used for running thedomain. The allowed values are driver specific, but include "xen", "kvm","hvf" (since 8.1.0 and QEMU 2.12), "qemu"and "lxc". The second attribute is id which is a unique integer identifierfor the running guest machine. Inactive machines have no id value.
The content of the name element provides a short name for the virtualmachine. This name should consist only of alphanumeric characters and isrequired to be unique within the scope of a single host. It is often used toform the filename for storing the persistent configuration file.Since 0.0.1
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