Force Bios Setup from PowerCLI

Friday 16 March 2012

Force Bios Setup from PowerCLI

I was trying to troubleshoot a Linux VM yesterday and the VM Console from vCenter would be too slow after a reset, so that I could not modify the kernel boot parameters, because by the time it displayed anything, there was already a kernel panic message and I had an unresponsive VM.

So I ticked the Force BIOS Setup option, to force the VM to go on to the BIOS screen on booting up. I removed quiet from the kernel entry in GRUB but all I got was a message saying that I should disable SElinux and after I went through the whole thing again and managed to boot up again without making any changes to the kernel entry, I thought I had better look for a PowerCLI solution, so here it is:

Fire up VMware vSphere PowerCLi.
Connect to vCenter (Connect-VIServer vcenterserver)
Import-Module -Name .\VMware.Vim.dll
$ida = get-vm -name ida
$idaVMBO = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineBootOptions
$idaVMBO.EnterBIOSSetup=$true
$idaVMCS = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec
$idaVMCS.BootOptions = $idaVMBO
$idaView = Get-View -VIObject $ida
$idaView.ReconfigVM($idaVMCS)
restart-vm $ida

To repeat the process after step 11, just do:

$idaView.ReconfigVM($idaVMCS)
restart-vm $ida -confirm:$false

I think this is a good candidate for a script.

2 comments:

Anonymous5 February 2021 at 19:30
function Set-VMBootToBIOS
{
param (
$VMs,
[bool]$BootToBIOS = $true
)

$vmbo = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineBootOptions
$vmbo.EnterBIOSSetup = $BootToBIOS
$vmcs = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec
$vmcs.BootOptions = $vmbo

foreach ($VM in $VMs)
{
if ($VM.typename -eq "VMware.VimAutomation.ViCore.Impl.V1.VM.UniversalVirtualMachineImpl")
{
$VM = $VM.name
}

$view = Get-View -VIObject $VM
$view.ReconfigVM($vmcs)
}

}
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