After you upgrade an ESXi host from an older version of ESXi that did not support UEFI secure boot, you might be able to enable secure boot. Whether you can enable secure boot depends on how you performed the upgrade and whether the upgrade replaced all the existing VIBs or left some VIBs unchanged. You can run a validation script after you perform the upgrade to determine whether the upgraded installation supports secure boot.
For secure boot to succeed, the signature of every installed VIB must be available on the system. Older versions of ESXi do not save the signatures when installing VIBs.
- If you upgrade using ESXCLI commands, the old version of ESXi performs the installation of the new VIBs, so their signatures are not saved and secure boot is not possible.
- If you upgrade using the ISO, new VIBs do have their signatures saved. This is true also for vSphere Upgrade Manager upgrades that use the ISO.
- If old VIBs remain on the system, the signatures of those VIBs are not available and secure boot is not possible.
- If the system uses a third-party driver, and the VMware upgrade does not include a new version of the driver VIB, then the old VIB remains on the system after upgrade.
- In rare cases, VMware might drop ongoing development of a specific VIB without providing a new VIB that replaces or obsoletes it, so the old VIB remains on the system after upgrade.
Note: UEFI secure boot also requires an up-to-date bootloader. This script does not check for an up-to-date bootloader.
Prerequisites
- Verify that the hardware supports UEFI secure boot.
- Verify that all VIBs are signed with an acceptance level of at least PartnerSupported. If you include VIBs at the CommunitySupported level, you cannot use secure boot.
