Personally, here are the recommendations for new ESXi 8.0 installations:
- VMware only supports UEFI boot in new installations
- For the purchase of new servers, it is suitable with TPM 2.0
- When upgrading to ESXi 8.0, verify that UEFI boot is enabled
Booting vSphere ESXi 8.0 may fail with “Error 10 (Out of resources)” (89682)
- Hardware machine is configured to boot in legacy BIOS mode.
- Booting stops early in the boot process with messages displayed in red on black with wording similar to “Error 10 (Out of resources) while loading module”, “Requested malloc size failed”, or “No free memory”.
VMware’s recommended workaround is to transition the machine to UEFI boot mode permanently, as discussed in KB article 84233 . There will not be a future ESXi change to allow legacy BIOS to work on this machine again.
Deprecation of legacy BIOS support in vSphere (84233)
VMware’s plans to deprecate support for legacy BIOS in server platforms.
If you upgrade a server that was certified and running successfully with legacy BIOS to a newer release of ESXi, it is possible the server will no longer function with that release. For example, some servers may fail to boot with an “Out of resources” message because the newer ESXi release is too large to boot in legacy BIOS mode. Generally, VMware will not provide any fix or workaround for such issues besides either switching the server to UEFI
Motivation
UEFI provides several advantages over legacy BIOS and aligns with VMware goals for being “secure by default”. UEFI
- UEFI Secure Boot, a security standard that helps ensure that the server boots using only software that is trusted by the server manufacturer.
- Automatic update of the system boot order during ESXi installation.
- Persistent memory
- TPM 2.0
- Intel SGX Registration
- Upcoming support for DPU/SmartNIC
