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I have some Dell PowerEdge R720 servers for testing. To make life easier, the UEFI boot is set to PXE first and in the PXE boot menu it'll default to boot from local disk if there's no input from the user. And in the PXE menu we can also choose to install a new ESXi to the hard disk.

The problem is, each time ESXi is reinstalled on the hard disk, the UEFI boot sequence will be reset to local disk first.

I've gone through BIOS settings back and forth but found no related setting.

Is this a hardware bug or there is some special BIOS setting I need to configure? Or it's ESXi installation that reset the UEFI boot sequence?

Before ESXi installation:

enter image description here

After ESXi installation:

enter image description here

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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The issue might be that you are not saving configuration. You should click back couple times and at the System Setup click finish and save the changes.

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    the conf was saved because the pxe boot is also used for the esx install. if the conf was not saved i could not get the pxe menu. Commented Jun 8, 2020 at 1:48
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    Got it! Might be a bug. Did you try to upgrade iDrac? Commented Jun 18, 2020 at 16:56
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The behavior turned out to be a new ESXi (7.0+) "feature" (did not find public doc yet). That's to say, the ESXi installer would create a UEFI boot option and place it first in the UEFI boot order when installing to a machine with UEFI firmware.

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  • Pretty much every OS does this, though. It would be unbootable (without manual intervention) otherwise. It's something you'll need to account for. Commented Jul 22, 2020 at 10:58
  • tried ubuntu 20.04 (a vm on esxi; cdrom using the downloaded .iso image) with efi today and the behavior is even more confusing to me. before installation i configured the boot order as (1.pxe, 2.local disk, 3. cdrom). after the install (from cdrom), the boot order became (1.cdrom, 2.ubuntu, 3.pxe). Commented Jul 22, 2020 at 11:50

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