Intel NUC

How to patch Intel NUC 10 with latest ESXi 7.0 update?

06/28/2020 by William Lam 4 Comments

vSphere 7.0b was just released last week and one of the important fixes was to resolve an issue where Nested ESXi VMs were crashing upon powering on an inner-guest VM. This looks to have also affect newer generations of CPUs including Intel's 10th Gen Comet Lake which is also found in the latest 10th Gen Intel NUCs (Frost Canyon).

A number of folks quickly found that if you simply applied the ESXi 7.0b patch, an unexpected behavior occurred on the 10th Gen Intel NUCs and the onboard networking was lost upon a reboot. This occurs as the original ne1000 driver which had been replaced with a newer version found within ESXi 7.0b no longer recognizes the onboard Intel NIC. The solution is quite simple, create a new Image Profile that contains the Intel NUC NIC Driver.

Several of you have asked for instructions and although this is a pretty common vSphere workflow, I have documented the two supported options using the vSphere Image Builder utility but there are definitely other methods which will have the same results. If you have access to a vCenter Server 6.7 or newer, I recommend using the Image Builder UI. If vCenter Server access is not available, then you can use Image Builder with PowerCLI, however you will need to have access to a Windows machine as the Image Builder cmdlet is not supported with PowerCLI Core.

Note: To prevent this from happening in the future, I am also working with Songtao, the developer of the Intel NUC driver to see if we can rename the VIB which should prevent this from happening with future updates.

Passthrough of Integrated GPU (iGPU) for standard Intel NUC

06/18/2020 by William Lam 1 Comment

Earlier this week I found out that it was possible to passthrough the Integrated GPU (iGPU) for standard Intel NUC which was motivated by a question I had saw on the VMware Subreddit. I have written about iGPU passthrough for Intel NUCs before but only for the higher end models which were the Hades Canyon NUC at the time.

Neat! Just found out you can actually passthrough the iGPU of standard Intel NUC. The trick looks to be enabling passthrough using ESXi Embedded Host Client UI & then you can assign it using vSphere UI#Homelab pic.twitter.com/NwuxbXwUMj

— William Lam (@lamw) June 15, 2020

To be honest, I never thought about trying this out with a standard NUC as I figured the iGPU may not be powerful enough or warrant any interests. After sharing the news on Twitter, I came to learn from the community that not only is this desirable for various use cases but some folks have also been doing this for some time now and have shared some the benefits it brings for certain types of workloads.

Can’t take credit. It was one of our collegaues that pointet me to it. Hw transcoding went up a factor of almost x 20. So for specefic workloads the nuc is suddently a lot more capable than before.

— Robert Jensen (@rhjensen) June 15, 2020

I’ve been doing this forever, when I need to crack passwords but don’t need the full 7 gpu rig - all Supermicro and 1080ti GPUs these dayshttps://t.co/GJGRV5eu8f

— Rob VandenBrink (@rvandenbrink) June 15, 2020

seems like this would be great for ESXi + Plex hardware transcoding

— Will Beers (@willbeers) June 15, 2020

Below are the instructions I used to enable iGPU passthrough on an Intel NUC 10 (Frost Canyon) with vSphere 7.0. These instructions should also be applicable for other NUC models and earlier versions of vSphere including details around passthrough configuration persistency which I know some folks have ran into which I was able to figure out as part of this experiment.

Homelab considerations for vSphere 7

03/30/2020 by William Lam 73 Comments

With the vSphere 7 Launch Event just a few days away, I know many of you are eager to get your hands on this latest release of vSphere and start playing with it in you homelab. A number of folks in the VMware community have already started covering some of the amazing capabilities that will be introduced in vSphere and vSAN 7 and I expect to see that ramp up even more in the coming weeks.

One area that I have not seen much coverage on is around homelab usage with vSphere 7. Given this is a pretty significant release, I think there are some things you should be aware of before you rush out and immediately upgrade your existing homelab environment. As with any vSphere release, you should always carefully review the release notes when they are made available and verify the hardware and its underlying components are officially on the VMware HCL, this is the only way to ensure that you will have a good and working experience.

Having said that, here are just a few of the observations that I have made while running pre-GA builds of vSphere 7 in my own personal homelab. This is not an exhaustive list and I will try to update this article as more information is made available.

Disclaimer: The following considerations below is based on my own personal homelab experience using a pre-GA build of vSphere 7 and it does not reflect any official support or guidance from VMware. Please use these recommendation at your own risk.

Decoding Intel NUC “Canyon” Generation with CPU “Lake” Generation Codenames

01/28/2020 by William Lam 9 Comments

Swift Canyon, Baby Canyon, Bean Canyon, Provo Canyon, Kaby Lake, Whiskey Lake, Coffee Lake ... these are just some of the Intel codenames that either refer to a NUC platform or CPU generation. I can understand the need for codenames, however for consumers, the various names are often confusing and being able to grok at which system is the "latest" is not always trivial. In some cases there are multiple updates to different generations of the platform all happening within a short period of time and most online sites may swap between codenames and the official "Nth" generation nomenclature.

I have been working with the Intel NUC platform from a VMware standpoint since the 6th Generation back in 2016 and even I still get confused at times on what is the latest "Canyon" NUCs and their respective "Lake" CPU generations. I can not imagine how complicated this might feel for some of our customers who are updating their VMware homelab every couple of years or someone who is just starting out for the first time. To not only help keep myself sane as I often get asked about Homelabs, literally on a weekly basis and to help educate others within out community, I have created a document which maps all Intel NUCs (full height) to their respective Nth generation along with the respective CPU architecture used in each platform.

Intel NUC 9 Pro & Extreme – First “Modular” NUC

01/07/2020 by William Lam 21 Comments

The highly anticipated "modular" Next Unit of Computing (NUC) has just been announced at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) this week, dubbed the Intel NUC 9 Pro (codename Quartz Canyon) and NUC 9 Extreme (codename Ghost Canyon). Boy am I super excited for this new platform and what it could mean for the VMware Community! 😍

Immediately off the bat, you can see that this is not your typical NUC "cube" form factor. Intel has completely redesigned the system from the inside and out, more on this in a bit. The key difference between the two NUC 9 variants (Pro and Extreme) are the CPU options, which are detailed below. For the remainder of this article, I will be focusing on the Pro version of the NUC 9 and I will call out any differences where applicable.

The use of the word "Pro" is also quite fitting as Intel is positioning this system as a high-end prosumer to Mid-Enterprise device compared to the traditional NUC. The NUC 9 Pro is targeting more demanding workloads such as Digital Content Creation, CAD/Manufacturing and Financial Service applications that either require a high-end graphics card or AI module for computing. When I first heard about this system from Intel, it conceptually reminded me of Apple's recent 2019 Mac Pro, which is also designed with modularity in mind and can cater to a variety of use cases.

Speaking of use cases, although Virtualization is not a target use case for this new platform, VMware customers have been taking advantage of the Intel NUCs for a number of years now and it is still by far the most popular platform for running a vSphere/vSAN/NSX Home Lab. However, one common complaint I often hear about the current generations of NUCs has been its CPU and I think the new NUC 9 Pro/Extreme will be a nice contender for current alternatives like the popular Supermicro E200-8D. Thanks to Intel, I was able to get my hands on a pre-production NUC 9 Pro unit for testing, so lets take a closer look at what this new platform has to offer!

64GB memory on the Intel NUCs?

03/14/2019 by William Lam 37 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.