Home Lab

ESXi 7.0 Update 2 enhancement for USB NIC only installations

03/16/2021 by William Lam 3 Comments

The USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling has been an extremely popular Fling that has allowed customers to easily add additional networking capabilities by using a supported USB-based network adapter even though ESXi traffic over USB networking is not officially supported.

In most deployments, the USB network adapter is usually a supplement to the existing onboard network adapter of a system. However, there have been scenarios where the onboard network adapter is either not available or functional and customers would still like to be able to install ESXi and have it running over just the USB network adapter.

Although installing ESXi using just a USB network adapter is possible today, one downside is that an additional workflow is needed to fix the network binding after installing ESXi.

During the interactive ESXi installation, you will see the following error at 81% which will cause installer to get stuck

Exception: No vmknic tagged for management was found.

At this point, the installer has completed and you need to switch to the console (Alt+F1) and perform a reboot. Once ESXi reboots, you will need to go into the DCUI and manually bind the vusb0 interface for ESXi management for connectivity. To persist this USB NIC binding, you will need to add small snippet of code as outlined here.

Obviously, this was not an ideal user experience and I personally had to use this workaround on several occasions, especially for newer hardware platforms where the onboard network adapter may not be recognized by ESXi and being able to use the USB Network Fling definitely came in handy.

With the release of ESXi 7.0 Update 2, we have improved the user experience for installing ESXi with just a single USB NIC. This enhancement was added by Songtao after mentioning the undesirable behavior. A new ESXi kernel boot option called usbBusFullScanOnBootEnabled can be added which removes the need for the workaround mentioned above. This new kernel option forces a full bus scan to claim all USB NICs that are attached since USB device claiming is slow compared to PCIe devices.

Easily create custom ESXi Images from patch releases using vSphere Image Builder UI

03/01/2021 by William Lam 5 Comments

Creating a custom ESXi Image Profile that incorporates additional ESXi drivers such as the recently released Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling or Community NVMe Driver for ESXi Fling is a pretty common workflow. Due to the infrequency of this activity, many new and existing users sometime struggle with the process to quickly construct a new custom ESXi Image Profile. I personally prefer to use the Image Builder UI that is built right into the vSphere UI as part of vCenter Server.

There are a couple of ways to create a custom new ESXi Image Profile using the Image Builder UI, but the easiest method is to use the Clone workflow, which is especially helpful when you are selecting an ESXi patch release as your base image.

With a regular major release, you only have to deal with two image profiles: standard (includes VMware Tools) and no-tools (does not include VMware Tools).

With an ESXi patch release, you actually have four image profiles: standard (includes VMware Tools + all bug/security fixes), security standard (includes VMware Tools + security fixes only), security no-tools (does not include VMware Tools + security fixes only) and no-tools (does not include VMware Tools + all bug fixes)

If you start with an empty custom image profile and then select your ESXi base image, you will notice there are multiple VIB version packages to select from since patch release you had imported earlier actually contains four different ESXi image profiles. Below are a step by step instructions on using the cloning workflow since this is a question I get from users who run into package conflicts not realizing they have selected the same package multiple times.

New Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling

02/17/2021 by William Lam 13 Comments

I am super excited to announce the release of a new Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling! The idea behind this project started about a year ago when we released an enhancement to the ne1000 driver as a community update which enabled ESXi to recognize the onboard network adapter for the Intel 10th Gen (Frost Canyon) NUC. Although the Intel NUC is not an officially supported VMware platform, it is extremely popular amongst the VMware Community. In working with the awesome Songtao, we were able to release this driver early last year for customers to take advantage of the latest Intel NUC release.

At the time, I knew that this would not be the last occurrence dealing with driver compatibility. We definitely wanted an easier way to distribute various community networking drivers that is packaged into a single deliverable for customers to easily consume and hence this project was born. In fact, it was quite timely as I had just received engineering samples of the new Intel NUC 11 Pro and Performance (Panther Canyon and Tiger Canyon) at the end of 2020 and work needed to be done before we could enable the onboard 2.5GbE (multi-gigabit) network adapter which is a default component of the new Intel Tiger Lake architecture. As reported back in early Jan, Songtao and colleague Shu were successful in getting ESXi to recognize the new 2.5GbE network adapter and has also been incorporated into this new Fling. In addition, we also started to receive reports from customers that after upgrading to a newer ESXi 7.0 releases, the onboard network adapters for the Intel 8th Gen NUC was no longer functioning. In an effort to help customers with this older platform, we have also updated the original community ne1000e driver to include the relevant PCI IDs within this Fling.

The new Community Networking Driver for ESXi is for PCIe-based network adapters and currently contains the following two driver modules:

igc-community - which adds support for Intel 11th Gen NUCs and any other hardware platform that uses the same 2.5GbE devices
e1000-community - which adds support for Intel 8th Gen NUC and any other hardware platform that uses same 1GbE devices

For a complete list of supported devices (VendorID/ProductID), please take a look at the Requirements tab on the Fling website. As with any Fling, this is being developed and supported in our spare time. In the future, we may consider adding other types of devices based on feedback from the broader community. I know Realtek-based PCIe NICs is something that many have been asking about and as mentioned back in this blog post, I have been in engaged with the Realtek team and hopefully in the near future, we may see an ESXi driver that can support some of the more popular devices in the community. If there are other PCIe-based networking adapters that could fit the Fling model, feel free to leave a comment on the Fling website and we can evaluate as time permits.

E100-9W – A new fanless Supermicro “NUC” platform

01/19/2021 by William Lam 12 Comments

At the end of 2020, I had published a blog article which covers the latest Supermicro kits that are being used and others that can be used for both VMware Homelabs as well as for production workloads. The article was very well received, especially as this is a topic that I frequently get questions about on the latest hardware kits that will work with vSphere, vSAN and NSX-T.

While researching for the article, I had a chance to speak with the Supermicro Product Manager and I came to learn about a new E100-9W platform that was just released last Spring of 2020. This platform is part of Supermicro's Embedded IoT family of servers and focuses on use cases such as Industrial Automation, Retail, Smart Medical Systems, Kiosks and Digital Signage to name a few. Many of these use cases are also applicable to our VMware customer base, especially for running a small and lower power footprint at an Edge or ROBO location. I was also interested in this platform as it could also be interesting for VMware homelabs.

ESXi on 11th Gen Intel NUC (Panther Canyon) & (Tiger Canyon)

01/13/2021 by William Lam 52 Comments

The highly anticipated 11th Generation Intel NUCs based on the new Tiger Lake processors has just been announced by Intel and I am excited to share my first hand experience with this new NUC platform. There are currently two models in the new 11th Gen lineup: the Intel NUC 11 Performance codenamed Panther Canyon (pictured on the left) which is the successor to the 10th Gen (Frost Canyon) NUC and the Intel NUC 11 Pro codenamed Tiger Canyon (pictured on the right) which is the successor to the 8th Gen (Provo Canyon) NUC.

There are a number of new improvements and capabilities that will make these new NUCs quite popular for anyone looking to build or upgrade their vSphere environment in 2021.

Before diving right in, I must say I love the new aesthetic look of the NUC chassis. In previous versions, the lid had a glossy and shiny finish, which easily left hand prints. These new models now have a clean matte finish. The NUC 11 Performance has a smoother feel compared to the NUC 11 Pro which has more of a texture to the finish, which I personally prefer. The other noticeable change is the power adapter, which is now half the size now which is nice for those looking to have several of these new kits sitting next to each other.

UPDATE (02/17/21) - The Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling has been released and is required for ESXi to recognize the new onboard 2.5GbE network adapter on all Intel NUC 11 models

ASRock AMD “NUC” Gen 2 Platform

12/20/2020 by William Lam 4 Comments

It has been about one year since I first got hands on with ASRock's first AMD "NUC" platform dubbed the 4x4 BOX.

A couple of months back, ASRock launched their 2nd generation of the 4x4 BOX platform which adds support for AMD's Ryzen 4000U series mobile processors with the introduction of the 4x4 BOX: 4800U (Ryzen 7), 4500U (Ryzen 5) and 4300U (Ryzen 3) models.

Loving the chassis redesign (left) compared to Gen 1 (right)

The exterior box looks much brighter and it oddly looks familiar … 🤔 All I can say, is good taste @ASRockUSA pic.twitter.com/GR0su7eFaR

— William Lam (@lamw) October 17, 2020

One immediate difference between the original 4x4 BOX (right) is the slimmed down chassis design, which gives it that classic "compact" look of a traditional NUC. The updated design definitely looks cleaner.