A few months ago, after a round of Windows OS patching on development servers, a server admin notified me that their server did not come back online after the patch initiated reboot. Looking at the VM console he noted that the server was at the BIOS setup screen. After exiting the BIOS Windows booted as expected.
The only explanation I could think of was someone checked the box ‘The next time the virtual machine boots, force entry into the BIOS setup screen.’ in the virtual machine properties. I looked into the issue and came up with a simple one-liner looking for any virtual machines with this option set. Here is that script:
Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine -Property Name,Config.BootOptions | where {$_.Config.BootOptions.EnterBIOSSetup -eq $true} | select Name
I did locate a couple of production VMs that had this option selected. I was able to remove the ‘EnterBIOSSetup’ flag from these servers before patching. I was unable to determine how/why/who this setting ended up getting changed, but thought I’d share the one liner in case anyone else encounters a similar issue.