Administrator Guide

Quick Boot on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers
1 Purpose
This document provides an overview of software and hardware configuration requirements to enable
vSphere Quick Boot feature on Dell EMC’s PowerEdge platforms. The goal of this document is to help
guide IT architects or system administrators to build a hardware configuration and software stack that
supports VMware vSphere6.7 Quick Boot feature on PowerEdge Servers.
2 Introduction
2.1 Quick Boot Overview
Quick Boot is a new type of “soft” reboot mechanism introduced in vSphere 6.7. Unlike a regular host
reboot operation (warm or cold), Quick Boot does not involve going through the actual hardware reboot
process. When you initiate a Quick Boot, ESXi restarts in a way similar to normal reboot operation but the
hardware does not go through the normal process of reboot operations such as POST, firmware load, re-
initialization of hardware resources, reload ACPI/SMBIOS tables etc...
This feature helps to speed up server management workflows which do not require a hardware reboot.
For example, applying an ESXi security patch or upgrading the ESXi hypervisor will most likely not require
you to have the host/hardware rebooted.
In this paper we discuss Dell EMC PowerEdge server models supported for Quick Boot feature, what the
typical time saving is, and what configurations are required in order to take advantage of Quick Boot in
Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers.
2.2 Quick Boot support on Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers
Quick Boot Feature is supported only on specific set of pre-qualified Dell EMC PowerEdge Platforms at
vSphere 6.7 GA. Below are the supported server models.
NOTE: The below list may get extended in the future.
1. R740
2. R740xd
3. R640
4. R730
5. R730xd
6. R630
3 Quick Boot Support Requirements
This section talks about minimum hardware and software configurations to enable Quick Boot. This
section also helps the end user aware of Quick Boot enablement status from Dell EMC customized
VMware ESXi 6.7 A00 image.