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.

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PowerCLI: Find BIOS-Enabled VMs

This script is an idea that spun off of my previous post, PowerCLI: Find UEFI-Enabled VMs. If you’re preparing to enable Secure Boot in a VMware environment, it may be helpful to identify the VMs that cannot be upgraded. As you might recall, enabling secure boot requires the following:

• VMware vSphere 6.5 or higher
• Virtual hardware version 13 or higher
• VMs need to be configured with EFI boot firmware

PowerCLI: Find UEFI-Enabled VMs

With all the news regarding the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities over the past several months, there’s been a greater focus to get VMware virtual machines to virtual hardware version 9 or higher, as noted by Andrea Mauro’s post regarding these vulnerabilities. In addition to that, several companies and organizations may be looking to enable Secure Boot, a feature first introduced with vSphere 6.5. However, in order to enable secure boot, the virtual machine needs to be configured with both EFI boot firmware AND be on virtual hardware version 13 or higher.