Dell

vSphere 6.7 – QuickBoot – A Must See Feature!

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I must admit to not knowing about this until I stumbled upon it vSphere 6.7 has added a new feature called QuickBoot.

Quick Boot enables the ESXi host to restart straight into the ESXi load screen avoiding the initial POST and memory test screens. This is particularly cool when you are doing ESXi updates as the reboot time is dramatically shortened as shown below.

So how does it work?

  • When a reboot is necessary, devices are shut down and the hypervisor restarts
  • Hardware initialization and memory tests are not performed
  • Improves host availability and shortens maintenance windows

​Requirements

  • Supported server hardware (current: shortlist of Dell and HPE systems)
  • Native device drivers only – no vmklinux driver support
  • Secure boot not supported

How to enable it?

​Quick Boot is primarily intended to benefit Update Manager workflows, there are stringent checks for compatibility, according to the following files

  • /usr/lib/vmware/loadesx/whitelist.txt & platforms.txt

​It is also possible to enable Quick Boot from the ESXi console

  • /usr/lib/vmware/loadesx/bin/loadESXCheckCompat.py
  • loadESXEnable –e

​To test whether or not the last reboot was quick or normal

  • vsish -e get /system/loadESX/isBootLoadESX

Additional troubleshooting info can be found in the logs

  • /var/log/loadESX.log

4kn & 512e vSphere Support

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Just a reminder for people not to create volumes with a 4K sector size with vSphere or VSAN, allot of the newer firmware revisions are now allowing 4K sector sizes for example Dell EqualLogic.

See the below screenshot as an example although the 512byte sector size is the default the adventurous or hungover IT admin amongst us may end up going with the 4K option without considering the consequences.

Screenshot 2015-09-02 10.20.28

VMware have made their support statement quite clear on this over the last few months but I thought I would repost this for the benefit of others who might not of seen this KB.

What are 4K Native and 512e drives?
Industry standard disk drives have been using a native 512 bytes sector size. However, due to the increasing demand for larger capacities, the storage industry introduced new advanced formats, which are 512-byte emulation (512e) and 4KB Native (4Kn).

4Kn is the advanced format in which the physical sectors and logical sectors are both 4,096 bytes in size.

512e is the advanced format in which the physical sector size is 4,096 bytes, but the logical sector size emulates 512 bytes sector size.

This table compares Native 512-byte sectors to the new advanced formats:

Format Logical Sector Size Physical Sector Size
512n 512 512
512e 512 4,096
4Kn 4,096 4,096

Does current GA version of vSphere and VSAN support 4K Native drives?

No. 4K Native drives are not supported in current GA releases of vSphere and VSAN.

Does current GA version of vSphere and VSAN support 512e drives?

No. 512e drives are not supported with the current versions of vSphere and VSAN due to potential performance issues when using these drives.

For further reading please see VMware KB2091600