PXE Booting to WDS with VMXNET3.0

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Had some trouble with our ESX VMs booting to the Windows Deployment Server when using UEFI.

UEFI is now the default boot for VMs - finally!

Changing the network interface from VMXNET3.0 to E1000e made things work again!  We had Secure Boot enabled in both cases.

Our physical devices (DELL Latitudes) have no issue so we suspected ESX.

Devices with VMXNET interfaces were failing to boot, get DHCP or anything....they just (seemingly) timed out.

Turns out, for us it was a TFTP configuration.

In WDS right click your WDS Server node and open the properties dialog.   GO to the TFTP config tab and set the following

Disable : Enable Variable Window Extension

Configure: Maximum Block Size to 16384

Worked for us.

Thanks to fboehme (although I see Secure Boot is disabled in this post!)

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/572481?start=15&tstart=0

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