Recently, I was involved in a big infrastructure refreshment project for one of our customers across different locations in Europe. The old hosts were replaced with the brand new Dell PowerEdge R710 hosts with Intel X5650 processor and 96 GB of memory. All hosts were installed with the vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi). Here are some best practice BIOS settings that we used during the project.

Power on the server and press F2 during the initialization process to enter the BIOS and let’s start with:

Memory Settings

• Set Node Interleaving to Disabled

Processor Settings

• Set Virtualization Technology to Enabled
• Set Turbo Mode to Enabled
• Set C1E to Disable

Integrated Devices

• Set the Embedded NIC1 to Enabled without PXE

Serial Communication

• Set Serial Communication to Off
• Set Redirection After Boot to Disabled

 

Power Management

• Set for Maximum Performance

Save the settings and reboot the server. You can now start the installation of the VMware vSphere Hypervisor 🙂

Cheers!

– Marek.Z