Newer enterprise-class hardware is starting to use UEFI instead of BIOS. UEFI is a big improvement, but there isn’t much documentation on the subject. Today I had to configure the UEFI for a new node in our cluster. I wanted to configure it exactly like an existing node that works. It was challenging just to find out how to display the configuration of the old node without rebooting the node and paging through dozens of configuration screens with the keyboard. Then I discovered IBM’s Advanced Settings Utility software, which fortunately was already installed on our cluster. It appears to be free for download, but with a restricted license. To display the complete UEFI configuration for a server, ssh to the server and run
$ asu64 show > server_UEFI_config.txt
Now you should have the variable of every UEFI variable, which you can use to set up new servers. Note that you can also run asu64 dump, but that’s not what you want! Dump is used to see the raw contents of CMOS memory on a BIOS machine.