How to boot a Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS 6.x / CentOS 7.x standby virtual machine in an EFI environment

Revised on June 23, 2020

Operating procedures of booting a Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS 6.x / CentOS 7.x standby virtual machine in an EFI environment

Before booting Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS 6.x / CentOS 7.x standby virtual machine in an EFI environment, you need to create a boot entry before booting up the standby VM.
The following are the operating procedures how to configure the settings.

ESXi Target Host

When booting standby VM in EFI environment the following window is displayed.
Select [Enter Setup] and press Enter key.

Select [Configure boot options] and press Enter key.

Select [Add boot option] and press Enter key.

Select [NO VOLUME LABEL,] and press Enter key.

Select [<EFI>] and press Enter key.

Select the following and press Enter key.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS 6.x <redhat>
- CentOS 7.x : <centos>

Select the following and press Enter key.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS 6.x : grub.efi
- CentOS 7.x : shimx64.efi

Select [Input the description] and press Enter key.

Enter a label name in the displayed dialog and press Enter key.

Select [Commit changes and exit] and press Enter key.

Select [Exit the Boot Maintenance Manager] and press Enter key.

Select [Shut down the system] and press Enter key.

Now, you can boot up the system.
* When a different boot point (snapshot) is selected, you need to configure the above settings again.

When using ActiveImage Protector CentOSBE

Boot into CentOSBE and identify the partition the entry is located.

In this example, EFI partition is located in "/dev/sda1".

Run the following command and create a boot entry.

CentOS7.5 or earlier
# efibootmgr --create --label CentOS --disk /dev/sda1 --loader /EFI/centos/shimx64.efi

CentOS6.x / RHEL6.x
# efibootmgr --create --label CentOS --disk /dev/sda1 --loader /EFI/redhat/grub.efi

Boot into CentOSBE again and boot up the OS.

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