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ESXi on 10th Gen Intel NUC (Frost Canyon)

01/02/2020 by William Lam 18 Comments

Just a heads up, if you are considering the latest 10th Generation of the Intel NUC (formally known as Frost Canyon) which are now available on Amazon, Newegg & SimplyNUC, there is an issue to be aware of. The onboard Intel NIC is not detected by ESXi which prevents the installer from proceeding. This issue was reported by a fellow reader named Ben who reached out to me over the holiday and with his help, I was able to get access to the system. It looks like the these NUCs have a newer version of I219-V NIC which is currently not recognized by either the vmklinux e1000 or ne1000 driver.

UPDATE (01/20/20) - As shared on Twitter last Friday, we now have an updated ne1000 driver that will detect the Intel NIC found in the new 10th Gen NUC. You will need to replace the existing ne1000 driver with the new offline bundle, which can be downloaded from here. I would like to remind folks that the Intel NUC is not an officially supported platform from VMware and although have have enable this new system for the community, it does not mean this system or previous generations are supported.

Happy Friday! Thanks to one of our amazing VMware Engineers in China, Songtao (you may know his work on USB NICs for ESXi), we now have built-in NIC working with ESXi on #NUC10 🥳

Details will be shared when ready, but for #Homelab folks, you’re good! pic.twitter.com/tqueIGn5xD

— William Lam (@lamw) January 17, 2020

There are two options to author a new ESXi Image Profile containing the ne1000 driver, the easiest method is if you have an existing vCenter Server and using the vSphere H5 Client and Image Builder UI. Import latest ESXi 6.7 Update 3 Image Profile offline bundle along with the ne1000 offline bundle and then de-select the existing ne1000 driver as shown in the screenshot below.

Next, select the update ne1000 driver and then export the new Image Profile to an ISO which can then be used to install on the NUC.

For more details on how to use Image builder, please have a look at the official VMware documentation linked below.

Option 1: Use vSphere H5 Client and Image Builder UI in vCenter Server to create the new Image Profile with the ne1000 driver.

Option 2: Use PowerCLI and the Image Builder cmdlets to create the a new Image Profile with the ne1000 driver.

~~For those interested, here is the PCI ID mapping for the new NIC, which is also NOT on VMware's HCL.~~

~~0000:00:1f.6 Network controller Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection (10) I219-V~~
~~Class 0200: 8086:0d4f~~

Manually adding the PCI ID to the map files (which we had initially tried) will also not work as changes to the driver would be required to enable this device. At this time, if you wish to use this system with ESXi, it is recommended that you use the ESXi Native Driver for USB NIC Fling along with a supported USB NIC to get network connectivity and ESXi to install.

Hands on with new AMD “NUC” platform from ASRock

11/16/2019 by William Lam 6 Comments

It has been rumored for some time now that AMD would be re-entering the embedded/small form factor (SFF) market and with their latest generation of Ryzen CPUs, timing could not be more perfect. With the rise of Edge and IoT workloads, new constraints like cost, footprint, low to no tech-touch and power consumption is now top of mind more than ever for customers.

At VMware, we certainly see interests from customers across this spectrum whether it is a traditional "ROBO" environment running a handful of Virtual Machines for a supermarket or retail chain to an industrial site such as an oil rig or factory to mobile infrastructure like a car, ship or even a submarine. On top of these use cases, personal and development labs continue to be extremely popular amongst our customer base for learning and training purposes.

Today, the Intel NUC is still by far the most popular platform due to its size, portability, cost and low power consumption for running VMware vSphere, vSAN & NSX. The idea of an AMD "NUC" kit which includes a chassis, motherboard and CPU is something that that many folks have been asking for. With the market mostly dominated by Intel, I certainly welcome AMD re-entering this market as this will certainly drive new solutions and innovations in this market. With that said, AMD has re-entered into this market and this is initially through partnerships with several OEMs/manufacturers.

Customizing the NSX-T Login UI

10/29/2019 by William Lam 1 Comment

I have been doing some automation with NSX-T 2.5 lately and for troubleshooting and validation purposes, I obviously make use of the NSX-T UI. After each new deployment I need to login to verify a few things. Out of pure laziness, I really would like to be able to login with just a single click for development purposes. I certainly could use password manager but it would still be a couple of clicks but I was looking something slightly quicker and that could easily work in a number of environments that I have.

Looking around the filesystem of the NSX Unified Appliance, I found the structure for the login UI to be fairly similiar (thanks to VMware Clarity) to that of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I found that I could apply the same techniques I had used to customize the VCSA Login UI including setting up pre-filled credentials (no recommended for obvious reasons) on the NSX-T Appliance.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, use at your own risk. Please make sure to perform a backup of all original files prior to editing in case you need to restore back the system defaults.

ESX 3.x on VMware Cloud on AWS?

10/10/2019 by William Lam 2 Comments

VMworld Barcelona is just around the corner and this week I started working on building out the different demo environments which will all be running on VMware Cloud on AWS. In one of the demos, I need to have ESX 3.0 running, yes you read that correctly! ESX as in the original version with the Service Console (cos), some of you maybe too young to remember these good ol days? 😉

First, Let me be clear, there really is no good reason for this except for the nostalgia purposes and for what I am trying to demonstrate in our VMworld session. If you are curious about the demo and attend VMworld, be sure to sign up for HBI1967BE Workload Migration Techniques for On-Premises and Cloud Infrastructures which I will be co-presenting with Emad Younis. Secondly, Nested Virtualization whether it is the latest version of ESXi or our very first release, is not officially supported.

USB Native Driver Fling for ESXi adds support for Multi-Gig (1G/2.5G/5G) Adapter

09/27/2019 by William Lam 4 Comments

Today, we have an exciting update to give on our USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling which has had two updates since releasing earlier this year and has been extremely well received by the VMware community. As many of you know, I am always on the look out for new and innovative tech that can help enable our customers, especially when it comes to building home labs to learn about the latest and greatest VMware software.

Several months back, I came to learn about a really cool USB-based Multi-Gigabit Network Adapter (QNA-UC5G1T) from QNAP which can negotiate with speeds up to 1Gbps, 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps. I was not familiar with the multi-gig specification but it it looks like it was created as a standard back in 2016 as IEEE 802.3bz. This initially evolved from advancements in wireless technology but more recently it started to make its way into ethernet-based devices.

Although this particular device is from QNAP, the underlying chipset is actually from Aquantia, now part of Marvell. If the name sounds familiar, it should as Aquantia is also the vendor to Apple for their 10GbE NICs in both the 2018 Mac Mini and new iMac Pros. In fact, their chipsets are also used in a number of Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE NICs which also works with ESXi. Access to 10GbE is certainly more common these days but it certainly is not for everyone and not all platforms can be expanded to support it.

The QNA-UC5G1T device is not only small but because it is USB-based, you are more likely to have spare USB ports on your system than say a traditional PCIe slot or Thunderbolt 3 port. From a cost standpoint, this device is about half the cost of the 10GbE Thunderbolt adapter coming in at $79 USD and can be ordered from Amazon. As far as I know, QNAP is the only vendor who has produced a multi-gig USB adapter, but perhaps in the future, there will be other vendors.

New hardware support & enhancements to USB Network Native Driver for ESXi

06/17/2019 by William Lam 1 Comment

Since releasing the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling back in February, the feedback and support for this Fling has simply been amazing. I especially enjoy hearing from customers, almost on a weekly basis, on how they are taking advantage of this solution in their vSphere/vSAN/NSX home lab and enabling for more complex networking topologies.

When we released the fling, we had focused on the most popular USB 3.0 network adaptors that we had accessed to which were based on AX8817a, AX88179 & RTL8153 chipsets. The initial list started out with just 5 devices, but we knew there were going to be others. In fact, Songtao and I have received plenty of feedback from our customers on what they would like to see supported, including USB 2.0 network adaptors. Another highly requested feature that customers have been asking for is support for Jumbo Frames and this is usually in the context of setting up either an NSX-V or NSX-T environment.