Book Image

The Complete VMware vSphere Guide

By : Mike Brown, Hersey Cartwright, Martin Gavanda, Andrea Mauro, Karel Novak, Paolo Valsecchi
Book Image

The Complete VMware vSphere Guide

By: Mike Brown, Hersey Cartwright, Martin Gavanda, Andrea Mauro, Karel Novak, Paolo Valsecchi

Overview of this book

vSphere 6.7 is the latest release of VMware's industry-leading virtual cloud platform. By understanding how to manage, secure, and scale apps with vSphere 6.7, you can easily run even the most demanding of workloads. This Learning Path begins with an overview of the features of the vSphere 6.7 suite. You'll learn how to plan and design a virtual infrastructure. You'll also gain insights into best practices to efficiently configure, manage, and secure apps. Next, you'll pick up on how to enhance your infrastructure with high-performance storage access, such as remote direct memory access (RDMA) and Persistent memory. The book will even guide you in securing your network with security features, such as encrypted vMotion and VM-level encryption. Finally, by learning how to apply Proactive High Availability and Predictive Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), you'll be able to achieve enhanced computing, storage, network, and management capabilities for your virtual data center. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll be able to build your own VMware vSphere lab that can run high workloads. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: VMware vSphere 6.7 Data Center Design Cookbook - Third Edition by Mike Brown and Hersey Cartwright Mastering VMware vSphere 6.7 - Second Edition by Martin Gavanda, Andrea Mauro, Karel Novak, and Paolo Valsecchi
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

The best practices for ESXi host BIOS settings

The BIOS settings will vary, depending on the hardware manufacturer and the BIOS version. Supported BIOS versions should be verified on the VMware HCL for the hardware selected. The following screenshot shows the HCL details of a Dell PowerEdge R620, with the supported BIOS versions:

HCL details with supported BIOS versions

If the hardware is supported but the running BIOS version is not supported, the BIOS should be upgraded to a supported version.

How to do it…

The BIOS manufacturer and the BIOS version will determine the BIOS settings available for a particular server. The following settings are provided as a guideline for optimizing the BIOS for an ESXi installation...