Understanding ESXi Quick Boot Compatibility

Products

VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Quick Boot is a vSphere feature that speeds up the upgrade process of an ESXi server. A regular reboot involves a full power cycle that requires firmware and device initialization. Quick Boot optimizes the reboot path to avoid this, saving considerable time from the upgrade process.

Not all servers or configurations support the Quick Boot feature. The Quick Boot support depends on the requirements described below. You can only enable the Quick Boot feature in the Update Manager UI if the system is supported. The Quick Boot feature includes some prechecks functionality to prevent the usage on an unsupported configuration. If any of these precheck are not met, a regular reboot is performed. Hardware vendor can define additional requirements, not validated by our prechecks.

You can only enable Quick Boot in the Update Manager UI if the below considerations are met.

General requirements:

Host platform should be supported, see related information.
All device drivers should be supported, see related information.

Our precheck functionality contains individual checks for the platform and drivers. An OEM may define additional restriction in its own documentation, not cover by our checks.

Note:
While performing an upgrade where the source builds are ESXi 8.0 U1 (and any patches on that line) or ESXi 8.0 U2 (and any patches on that line), customers may hit a PSOD during early boot with error message: "Unable to restore system configuration. A security violation was detected. https://via.vmw.com/security-violation"
The workaround is to reboot the host and it will be upgraded. Please refer to KB 81446.

Additional constraints for 8.0 U1

Intel TXT is disabled

Additional constraints for 8.0 and earlier releases

Systems does not have any Persistent Memory installed
TPM is disabled

Note: If you are using vSphere ESXi 7.0 U2 or later, disabling the TPM after it was previously enabled may fail system boot, see Boot time failures due to ESXi configuration encryption.

Additional constraints for 6.7:

No passthrough devices configured for VMs on your host
No vmklinux drivers loaded on your host

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0.1

Resolution

To check if your system is compatible with Quick Boot, run this command on the ESXi host from the shell:

/usr/lib/vmware/loadesx/bin/loadESXCheckCompat.py

Note: This script will list all issues preventing Quick Boot from being available on the ESXi host.

For ESXi 7.0, if the script returns that your system is compatible, you shall also check the server vendor documentation about additional restrictions.

[Example: (un)supported devices for a given platform, restrictions on the used driver or firmware versions]

Note: Quick Boot feature is not supported on Distributed Services Engine support Server configurations installed with DPUs

Additional Information

For ESXi 7.0 or newer versions, you can check the hardware compatibility see:

If the host platform is not compatible with Quick Boot, see: