Why Esxi 6.5 or 6.7 fail to start setup GUI via iPXE

[pxe_curious]

I have been fighting the same thing.

I have tons of Dell 13th and 14th-generation servers that work just fine with iPXE (snponly.efi) and UEFI (Windows/Linux/ESXi). But recently I started evaluating a Lenovo ThinkServer SR630 and was experiencing the same thing. ESXi 6.5, 6.7 and 7.0 would just hang at the Shutting down firmware services message.

I saw that UEFI-related fix that was committed for and which mcb is referring to, but I would continue to have the same issue, even with a newly built iPXE binary that included the fix.

When I enable Legacy BIOS mode I don't have any issues installing ESXi via iPXE, i.e. using undionly.kpxe.

I tried a signed versions of snponly.efi and guess what? It worked. I used an older signed version from VMware's autodeploy ZIP file (I posted in another thread about which file to use). So it didn't necessarily need the fix that mcb was referring to - in fact that fix did not solve the issue for me. Only a signed version of snponly.efi did. And Secure Boot was disabled in the firmware configuration, but it still for some reason required a signed iPXE binary.