EFI virtual machines getting stuck in EFI boot manager when trying to start after migration from ESXi 6.x to ESXi 7.x

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
After migrating an EFI virtual machine from ESXi 6.x to ESXi 7.0, it no longer boots successfully, but instead is getting stuck in the EFI boot manager showing similar messages as in the image below:



The guest operating system was installed per PXE
During the deployment the virtual machine had a different kind of virtual NIC configured (e.g. E1000 or E1000E) and was later changed to VMXNET3

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.x

Cause

When powering on an EFI virtual machine, certain settings related to it's virtual NIC are stored in a dedicated file with the suffix .nvram. Among others this file also contains driver options for these vNICs. Once the vNIC is being changed, the driver options for the old vNIC are being kept in the file, leading to the problem.

Resolution

This issue has been fixed in ESXi 7.0 Update 3f