PowerCLI: Find VMs Based on Virtual Hardware Version

Hello again, everyone! For my fifth post for this year’s #BlogtoberTech challenge, I decided to share a script I recently wrote that seeks out virtual machines in a vSphere environment based on a specific virtual hardware version. This sort of ties in with the BIOS and UEFI scripts I wrote earlier in the year to seek out VMs that may still be open to the Spectre/Meltdown vulnerabilities (virtual hardware version 8 or older). Or perhaps someone wants to seek out VMs that may be good candidates to enable Secure Boot (virtual hardware 13 or newer with EFI boot firmware configured).

In the initial version of this script, I ask the user to pick the vCenter to connect to, the datacenter object to scan, and then the virtual hardware version to seek out. If VMs of virtual hardware n are found, the user has the option of exporting the results to a CSV file. Otherwise, a dialog box will appear (via Out-GridView) that shows the results of the can. If, however, no VMs with a specified virtual hardware version are found, it will simply let the user know that “No VMs with virtual hardware n were found.”

As usual, the latest version of this script can be found over on my GitHub page, but here’s the script as it was written at the time of this post:

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PowerCLI: Quickly Look Up VM’s Boot Firmware Setting

A few months ago, I wrote two blog posts about how to find all UEFI- or BIOS-enabled virtual machines at the data center level within a vCenter Server. But what if you just want to quickly look up the boot firmware setting of a specific VM or even just a few of them?

I wrote this script as a way to quickly look up a small number of VMs to see if they might be good candidates for enabling Secure Boot or not. If you recall from those two posts, in order to enable Secure Boot, a VM needs to have virtual hardware version 13 or higher (meaning vSphere 6.5 or higher), and the VM boot firmware needs to be set to EFI.

Creating a UEFI-Enabled VM in VMware Fusion 8.x

Update: 2018-OCT-01 – This post applies to VMware Fusion version 8.x and older. Updates were made in VMware Fusion 10 to make it easier to create a UEFI-enabled VM from the GUI.

Let’s say you want to build a new VMware Fusion virtual machine using the newer UEFI firmware instead of the traditional BIOS. How is that done in VMware Fusion? Unlike VMware Workstation and ESXi, there’s no GUI-based option to choose EFI over BIOS (at least as of this writing). So, I decided to put this post together to walk you through the process. I should also point out that this needs to be done before an operating system is installed to the VM.

If you’re not sure what the differences are between UEFI and BIOS, How-To-Geek has two great articles that explain how newer UEFI firmware differs from traditional BIOS; “What Is UEFI, and How Is It Different from BIOS?” and “What You Need to Know About Using UEFI Instead of the BIOS.”