Why is on my NVIDIA enabled vSphere host Quick Boot disabled?

Currently, I’m in the process of building a new Horizon environment on HPE Synergy. Their Synergy 480 Gen10 blades support Quick Boot and on all of the clusters, this was enabled automatically. Except for one Cluster… This cluster has NVIDIA P6 cards in the expansion bay. The message in update manager is kinda useless… just says it’s disabled but not why! Kinda suspected the cards were the blocking issue but how does one check this for sure?

So what is Quick Boot

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 Update Manager UI will present Quick Boot as an option for servers that support the feature, however, for some servers, this option will not be available and your host will perform regular reboot rather than a Quick Boot.

You may see this issue if:

  • Host platform is not supported.
  • Host is configured to use a TPM.
  • passthru devices configured for VMs on your host.
  • vmklinux drivers loaded on your host.
  • Other non-certified drivers loaded on your host
  • Quick Boot is disabled in the Update Manager UI.
  • Secure Boot is enabled on the host.

How to check Quick Boot status

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.

This shows that the culprit is the NVIDIA driver. Unfortunately, this blocks the whole quick boot option and for that, you have to deal with it 🙂 There is no way to get this enabled since it’s not supported unless the NVIDIA drivers get supported for this.
On a host with Quick Boot enabled you get:
So there it is one simple command to see the Quick Boot status.

1 thought on “Why is on my NVIDIA enabled vSphere host Quick Boot disabled?

  1. Kasun Anthony

    Hi thanks for the information ,
    I face same issue, i have 3 host , 2 two quick book showing Enabled one host showing not enabled ( Same hardware and server model / same firmware )

    I noticed one host already added PCI device as ( SAS card ) 🙂 finally understand the root cause.

    Kasun Anthony

    Reply

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