Hello,
I am currently a Software Engineering student and I also maintain a small Windows network at my family's company. I am looking to build a white box server for home use, in order to better understand ESXi and Linux.
I have been studying Supermicro's webpage for quite some time now, and I have noticed that the overwhelming majority of their latest server boards (X11) are not certified for booting ESXi from UEFI. Almost all of their boards are certified for booting ESXi from BIOS, however.
My questions:
- Is UEFI ESXi booting important for a new (as in modern) server?
- Is it possible that their latest X11 motherboards which are only certified for ESXi BIOS boot could also be booted in UEFI without problems? I am thinking that Supermicro did not want to go through the trouble of certifying certain boards, based on their use case.
- Is it possible to boot a ESXi UEFI certified board into ESXi BIOS without problems?
- Are there any differences in device passthrough between ESXi BIOS boot and UEFI?
All of the above questions are assuming a new install of ESXi on the server.
As you can tell, I am a total noob to ESXi. I would really appreciate your help.
Thanks in advance.