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

06/17/2019 by William Lam Leave a 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.

Quick Tip – Crucial NVMe SSD not recognized by ESXi 6.7

05/19/2019 by William Lam 9 Comments

If you own or have recently purchased Crucial NVMe SSD such as CT1000P1SSD8 (1TB M.2 NVMe SSD) or CT500P1SSD8 (500GB M.2 NVMe SSD), please be aware that these devices may no be recognized by ESXi after upgrading to the latest release. Thanks to Pete Lindley, (OCTO for End-User Computing), who reached out last week regarding the observation as well as a workaround for the problem. This was also quite timely as I recently purchased a Crucial M.2 NVMe SSD and would have also ran into this problem.

It turns out these Crucial devices were working fine while running on ESXi 6.5 Update 2 but was no longer recognized in latest release of ESXi 6.7 Update 2. It is unclear whether support for these SSDs were removed intentionally or unintentionally, but in either case, these devices are not officially on VMware's Hardware Compatibility List (HCL).

UPDATE (05/23/19) - After speaking with a few folks who took a closer look, the issue is due to the fact that we added support for NVMe 1.3 spec in latest ESXi 6.7 Update 2 release, but because these are "consumer" devices, they did not conform to the latest specification and hence the driver is unable to claim the device. This is another good reminder when using components not on VMware HCL, this is always a risk from a home lab perspective. In general, I know Samsung and Intel NVMe SSD usually works quite well without issues but always good to do some research. I think Engineering is looking to see if there are other workarounds for the future, but for now, you can use the workaround below.

The easy workaround that Pete found was to simply replace the NVMe driver from ESXi 6.7 Update 2 (1.2.2.27-1vmw.670.2.48.13006603) with one found in ESXi 6.5 Update 2 (1.2.1.34-1vmw.650.2.50.8294253). To so do, simply copy nvme.v00 to /bootbank from either an existing ESXi 6.5 Update 2 system or directly from the ISO. Please note, any future updates or patches to the ESXi host will most likely override the updated driver.

64GB memory on the Intel NUCs?

03/14/2019 by William Lam 20 Comments

I just got my hands on a pair of 32GB SODIMM memory modules (64GB total) which I had been waiting to evaluate since last Fall. Apparently, it has taken some time for these high capacity memory modules to be readily available in the consumer market. Even after the announcement of the new 2018 Apple Mac Mini last year, which officially supports 32GB SODIMMS, I was not aware of any vendors who were selling these modules direct to consumers.

My primary interests in these memory modules was whether they would work on the latest Intel NUCs, specifically the Hades Canyon (NUC8i7HNK) which are the prosumer versions of the standard Intel NUCs that many folks use for vSphere Home Labs. Both the standard and Skull/Hades Canyon NUCs all officially support a maximum of 32GB of memory (2x16GB SODIMM), however it been hypothesized by the community that they *should* in theory be able to go up to 64GB, especially as some of the newer CPUs technically state support for it.

Touch screen + case for the Raspberry Pi 3

03/07/2019 by William Lam 2 Comments

I just purchased a nice little touch screen for my Raspberry Pi 3 (rPI) which I had shared on Twitter yesterday and a number of folks were also interested in the details. First off, I want to give a huge shoutout to Frances Wong who I came to learn about this nifty touch screen in the first place. I noticed that Francis only had the screen adaptor and I was also interested in getting a case that can house both the rPI and the touch screen. After a quick search online, I found there was a companion case which I had also purchased and you can see what it looks like fully assembled below.

GPU Passthrough of Radeon RX Vega M in Intel Hades Canyon

01/15/2019 by William Lam 51 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.

ESXi on the new 2018 Apple Mac Mini

11/09/2018 by William Lam 30 Comments

Thanks to the Green Mini Host (Apple Mac Mini hosting and collocation provider) who were the first to publicly confirm that latest release of ESXi (6.7 Update 1) works on the recently announced 2018 Apple Mac Mini.

Conforming @VMware #ESXi runs on the new Mac Mini 2018! #macmini2018 @vGhetto @lamw pic.twitter.com/DRqQ4lsWn5

— Green Mini host (@macminihost) November 7, 2018

For vSphere/vSAN Home Lab enthusiasts, the price of the new Mac Mini, especially when it is fully loaded is probably a tough sale. However, for customers developing on MacOS including iOS development, CI/CD, build farms, gaming, etc. which benefit from running on vSphere. For these customers, support for ESXi on the new Mac Mini is extremely interesting, especially with the updated hardware giving these systems a significant boost in performance even when comparing to the current Mac Pro 6,1 and iMac Pro models. In fact, I had number of folks ping me after Apple introduced it during their keynote asking if ESXi would work on the Mini's.

Disclaimer: Apple Mac Mini (both old and new) hardware are NOT officially supported by VMware. The only officially supported Apple hardware platform is the Mac Pro 6,1 or Mac Pro 5,1. For more details, please refer to VMware's Hardware Compatibility List.