The ProLiant DL580 Gen8Plus is the first ProLiant server that will support UEFI.

UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware and is an alternative to the Legacy BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) firmware interface that has been in use for many years.

You can use IC server provisioning to provision UEFI capable servers in either Legacy BIOS boot mode or UEFI boot mode.

The HP-provided Build Plans have been modified in 7.3.1, as needed, to work in either Legacy BIOS boot mode or UEFI boot mode. The default is Legacy BIOS boot mode. There are two HP-provided Build Plans that allow you to set the boot mode on a server:

See the HP Insight Control Server Provisioning Build Plans Reference Guide for more information on these Build Plans. There is also a ProLiant HW — Clear UEFI Boot Menu build plan.

Once you set the boot mode on a server using one of these Build Plans, you typically won’t have to run these Build Plans again, unless you decide to install an OS that is not supported in that boot mode and requires a different boot mode. If you plan on installing different OSs on a server, each which requires a specific boot mode, you can add one of these Build Plans to the beginning of an OS installation job to ensure that the boot mode has been set correctly for the OS Build Plan you want to run (see the online help topic “Combine multiple build plans to perform many tasks at once”).

The ProLiant HW – Switch to UEFI boot mode and Power Off Build Plan sets the boot mode to UEFI with optimized enabled, which provides improved boot time. To disable UEFI optimization, you can make a copy of the Build Plan and change the parameters from --bootmode=UEFI_OPTIMIZED to --bootmode=UEFI. Programmatically setting UEFI secure boot is not supported on the ProLiant DL580 Gen8Plus servers.

Some OSs may not support the UEFI boot mode, and some OSs may support the UEFI boot mode, but not if optimized is enabled, for example. Therefore, some OS Build Plans can only be run in Legacy BIOS boot mode, some OS Build Plans can be run in either boot mode, and some OS Build Plans may support UEFI boot mode, but only if optimized is disabled. See the Insight Management Support Matrix for details on what operating system versions support UEFI and any other limitations.