William Lam

GPU Passthrough of Radeon RX Vega M in Intel Hades Canyon

01/15/2019 by William Lam 9 Comments

With the latest Intel Hades Canyon now being able to run ESXi, a number of folks have been interested in taking advantage of the integrated GPU that is included in the system. There are two models of the Hades Canyon, NUC8i7HNK which is the lower end system with Radeon RX Vega M and the NUC8i7HVK which is the higher end system with Radeon RX Vega GH. One of the first thing I had attempted after getting ESXi working on the Hades Canyon was to try to enable passthrough of the iGPU into a Windows GuestOS but in all my attempts, it resulted into a PSOD'ing the ESXi host once you start installing the AMD Drivers from Intel.

A few days ago, one of my readers, Chris78 shared an update where he was able to prevent the ESXi host from PSOD'ing by adding a VM Advanced Setting but he he was still having issues where the Windows GuestOS would now BSOD. This sounded promising, I figure it would not hurt to gave it a try and to my surprise, I was able to successfully passthrough the iGPU to a Windows 10, Windows Server 2016 and 2019 system from my limited testing. After reporting the success back to Chris78 who was still having issues even after using the settings I had used, his conclusion was there may be a difference between the HNK and HVK models, with the latter having BSOD issues. For now, it seems like iGPU can only be passthrough if you have the NUC8i7HNK model.

Dual Intel M.2 Optane 4801x in Supermicro E300-9D

01/14/2019 by William Lam 6 Comments

For those that have been following along, I have been testing the Supermicro E300-9D (SYS-E300-9D-8CN8TP) kit in my home lab which I have written about here. One of the last things I was looking into was storage expandability with this platform, especially since Supermicro has a PCIe Add-On Card (AOC-SLG3-2M2) which can add two additional M.2 devices supporting 2260 (60mm), 2280 (80mm) & 22110 (110mm) form factors.

At the same time, our friends over at Intel had just given me access to a couple of their pre-release Intel M.2 Optane 4801x devices which were then released right before the holiday last year. For those wondering why Optane is so interesting, especially from a vSAN perspective, check out this blog post here from my good buddy Pete Flecha over in our Storage and Availability Business Unit (SABU).

This was actually perfect timing as I was also interested to see if there were any high performance and supported M.2 devices that could be used for for vSAN Caching and this device would definitely fit the bill! When I had initially received all the components, I was scratching my head as the AOC was too big to fit horizontally in the E300-9D.

How to change the default CPU and Memory requirements for deploying the VMC vCenter Cloud Gateway

01/13/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

When deploying the VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) vCenter Cloud Gateway (VCG), there is a minimum amount of vCPU and memory that is required for deployment. For customers who wish to evaluate this solution for non-production usage, such as a lab environment, it would be nice to be able to reduce the requirements purely for testing purposes. Today, the vCPU and Memory is not configurable and is currently encoded within a JSON configuration file as well as the VCG OVA. The fact that this is not part of the installer itself but within the OVA means we can actually change the default 🙂 Below are the instructions for updating the vCPU and Memory requirements for the VCG.

Step 1 - Download the VCG ISO from MyVMware and extract the ISO.

New VMC API to rename SDDC

01/12/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

A commonly requested feature in VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) is the ability to rename an SDDC. Currently, it is not possible to rename an SDDC after it has been deployed. On Friday, an update was made to the VMC Service to introduce a new VMC API (Tech Preview) that will allow customers to rename their SDDC. The API is just the first step and our UI folks are already working on adding this natively to the VMC UI which I actually got a sneak peak of just a few days ago.

The new SDDC rename API is very straight forward to use, you simply perform a PATCH operation the specific SDDC /orgs/{orgID}/sddcs/{sddcID} which includes a payload containing the updated name. Below are three ways in which you can easily rename your SDDC, including a UI method for those that want to quickly rename an SDDC and not have to write a single line of code.

Revisiting prompting for user input during an interactive or scripted install of ESXi

01/10/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

For those that have a need to prompt for additional user input during an installation of ESXi, whether that is an interactive session or using a scripted install (Kickstart) may have noticed the solution posted in my 2015 blog post no longer works with recent releases of ESXi (newer than 6.0).

I was recently contacted by VMTN community cacheman, who authored the original snippet after my 2011 post with an updated solution that would work with newer releases of ESXi (e.g. 6.5 or newer). Thanks to Chris, he discovered the following after taking another look at the initial hack:

It seems that the tty1 techsupport.sh which I had commented out in /etc/inittab is having no effect in these versions and the login prompt is starting on tty1. As far as I can tell this is because for versions >= 6.5, the init process starts before the extras.tgz is unpacked, so it reads the /etc/inittab that comes natively with ESXi rather than the modified one in extras.tgz.