Intel NUC

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

01/07/2020 by William Lam 14 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 33 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.

Update on running ESXi on Intel NUC Hades Canyon (NUC8i7HNK & NUC8i7HVK)

11/02/2018 by William Lam 51 Comments

The Intel NUC is one of the most popular and affordable hardware platform for running vSphere and vSAN Home Labs. For customers that want a bit more computing power, Intel also has their Skull Canyon platform which was released back in 2016 and has also gained in popularity amongst VMware Home Labbers. To be clear, the none of the Intel NUC platforms are on VMware HCL and therefore are not officially supported.

Earlier this year, Intel released their second generation of their higher-end Intel NUCs dubbed Hades Canyon which comes in two flavors NUC8i7HNK and NUC8i7HVK, with the latter being the higher-end unit. Based on the previous generation of hardware, most customers assumed ESXi should just work and went out and purchased the lower-end "HNK" version just to find out that was not case. The ESXi Installer would boot up to a certain point and then stop with the following error:

“Shutting down firmware services…..

Using “simple offset” UEFI RTS mapping policy”

To add to the confusion, this issue was not observed with the higher-end NUC8i7HVK model which was also quite interesting. Over on the nucblog.net, they also confirmed ESXi runs fine on "HVK" model and the issue seems to be isolated to the lower-end "HNK" model.

Exclusive vGhetto discount on homelab hardware from MITXPC

04/12/2017 by William Lam 4 Comments

On a regular basis I already receive a number of inquires from both internal VMware folks as well as external partners and customers about VMware homelabs and the type of hardware that can be used. After demo'ing our recent USB to SDDC project, the requests have literally tripled! Most folks are generally inquiring BOM details and/or where to purchase the Intel NUC or the SuperMicro E200-8D.

In particular, the SuperMicro E200-8D has probably received the most amount of interest lately. In fact, I am also interested in one after having an opportunity to play with one during the Melbourne VMUG. One thing I had noticed while talking to several colleagues who have purchased this system both locally within the Bay Area as well as overseas such as Australia was that one particular reseller kept coming up over and over again. That vendor was MITXPC which is a local bay area company located over in Fremont which specializes in Mini-ITX systems.

The reason MITXPC was being used by the majority of these folks was simple, they had the best price for the SuperMicro E200-8D which was significantly cheaper than other vendors including Amazon.

Vendor	Price
E200-8D on MITXPC	$799 USD ($783.02 w/discount code)
E200-8D on Amazon	$849 USD

Having heard good things about MITXPC, I decided to reach out to them and see if there was anything special they could do for the VMware Community. I was able to get a special discount code that would offer folks an additional 2% off their entire purchase at MITXPC. For those of you who have been holding off on a refresh your home lab or itching to build your own, this is a great time! If you would like to take advantage of this offer, simply use the discount code VIRTUALLYGHETTO2OFF when you check out. I would like to give a huge thanks to Eric Yui of MITXPC for working with me on this and helping out the VMware Community.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with MITXPC.

Update on Intel NUC 7th Gen (Kaby Lake) & ESXi 6.x

02/15/2017 by William Lam 28 Comments

Intel just started shipping their i3 7th Gen (Kaby Lake) Intel NUCs and no surprise, Florian of virten.net has already gotten his hands on a unit for testing. The Intel NUCs is a very popular platform for running vSphere/vSAN-based home labs, especially for their price point and footprint. Last week, Florian discovered from his testing that the built-in network adapter on the 7th Gen NUC was not being detected by any of the ESXi installers and had published his findings here.

Since the Intel NUC is not an officially supported platform for ESXi, it does not surprise me that these sort of things happen, even if the NUC had a pretty good track record going back to the 5th Gen releases. Nonetheless, I reached out to Florian to see if he can provide me with a vm-support bundle and see if there was anything I could do to help.

A couple of Engineers took a look and quickly identified the issue with the Kabylake NIC (8086:15d8) but before getting to the solution, I did want to clarify something. The Kabylake NIC is actually NOT an officially supported NIC for ESXi and although it currently shows up in the VMware HCL, it is a mistake. I have been told the VMware HCL will be updated shortly to reflect this, apologies for any confusion that this may have caused.

Ok, so the great news is that we do have a solution for getting ESXi to recognize the built-in NIC on the 7th Gen Intel NUCs. The semi-bad news is that we currently do not have a solution in the short term for any released version of ESXi, as the fix will require an updated version of the e1000e Native Driver which will only be available in a future update of ESXi. I can not provide any timelines, but keep an eye on this blog and I will publish more details once they are available.

In the meantime, if you already own a 7th Gen NUC, there is a workaround which Florian has already blogged about here which uses the USB Ethernet Adapter VIB for the initial ESXi installation. If you are planning to purchase the 7th Gen NUC and would like to wait for folks to confirm the fix, then I would recommend holding off or potentially looking at the 6th Gen if you can not wait. Thanks to Florian and others who shared their experiences with the 7th Gen NUC and also to the VMware Engineers who found a quick resolution to the problem.

UPDATE (07/27/17) - The updated e1000e Native Driver that was included in ESXi 6.0 Update 3 is now included in ESXi 6.5 Update 1 which just GA'ed. You should be able to install ESXi without require any additional modifications to the latest Intel NUCs.

UPDATE (02/24/17) - An updated e1000e driver which contains a fix for 7th Gen NUC is now available as part of ESXi 6.0 Update 3, below are several options in how you can consume the driver.

ESXi on the new Intel NUC Skull Canyon

05/21/2016 by William Lam 62 Comments

Earlier this week I found out the new Intel NUC "Skull Canyon" (NUC6i7KYK) has been released and have been shipping for a couple of weeks now. Although this platform is mainly targeted at gaming enthusiast, there have also been a lot of anticipation from the VMware community on leveraging the NUC for a vSphere based home lab. Similiar to the 6th Gen Intel NUC system which is a great platform to run vSphere as well as VSAN, the new NUC includes a several new enhancements beyond the new aesthetics. In addition to the Core i7 CPU, it also includes a dual M.2 slots (no SATA support), Thunderbolt 3 and most importantly, ~~an Intel Iris Pro GPU~~ a Thunderbolt 3 Controller. I will get to why this is important ...

UPDATE (05/26/16) - With some further investigation from folks like Erik and Florian, it turns out the *only* device that needs to be disabled for ESXi to successfully boot and install is the Thunderbolt Controller. Once ESXi has been installed, you can re-enable the Thunderbolt Controller and Florian has also written a nice blog post here which has instructions as well as screenshots for those not familiar with the Intel NUC BIOs.

UPDATE (05/23/16) - Shortly after sharing this article internally, Jason Joy, a VMware employee shared the great news that he has figured out how to get ESXi to properly boot and install. Jason found that by disabling unnecessary hardware devices like the Consumer IR/etc in the BIOS, it allowed the ESXi installer to properly boot up. Jason was going to dig a bit further to see if he can identify the minimal list of devices that needed to be disabled to boot ESXi. In the meantime, community blogger Erik Bussink has shared the list of settings he has applied to his Skull Canyon to successfully boot and install latest ESXi 6.0 Update 2 based on the feedback from Jason. Huge thanks to Jason for quickly identifying the workaround and sharing it with the VMware community and thanks to Erik for publishing his list. For all those that were considering the new Intel NUC Skull Canyon for a vSphere-based home lab, you can now get your ordering on! 😀

Below is an except from his blog post Intel NUC Skull Canyon (NUC6I7KYK) and ESXi 6.0 on the settings he has disabled:

BIOS\Devices\USB

disabled - USB Legacy (Default: On)
disabled - Portable Device Charging Mode (Default: Charging Only)
not change - USB Ports (Port 01-08 enabled)

BIOS\Devices\SATA

disabled - Chipset SATA (Default AHCI & SMART Enabled)
M.2 Slot 1 NVMe SSD: Samsung MZVPV256HDGL-00000
M.2 Slot 2 NVMe SSD: Samsung MZVPV512HDGL-00000
disabled - HDD Activity LED (Default: On)
disabled - M.2 PCIe SSD LEG (Default: On)

BIOS\Devices\Video

IGD Minimum Memory - 64GB (Default)
IGD Aperture Size - 256 (Default)
IGD Primary Video Port - Auto (Default)

BIOS\Devices\Onboard Devices

disabled - Audio (Default: On)
LAN (Default)
disabled - Thunderbolt Controller (Default is Enabled)
disabled - WLAN (Default: On)
disabled - Bluetooth (Default: On)
Near Field Communication - Disabled (Default is Disabled)
SD Card - Read/Write (Default was Read)
Legacy Device Configuration
disabled - Enhanced Consumer IR (Default: On)
disabled - High Precision Event Timers (Default: On)
disabled - Num Lock (Default: On)

BIOS\PCI

M.2 Slot 1 - Enabled
M.2 Slot 2 - Enabled
M.2 Slot 1 NVMe SSD: Samsung MZVPV256HDGL-00000
M.2 Slot 2 NVMe SSD: Samsung MZVPV512HDGL-00000

Cooling

CPU Fan HEader
Fan Control Mode : Cool (I toyed with Full fan, but it does make a lot of noise)

Performance\Processor

disabled Real-Time Performance Tuning (Default: On)

Power

Select Max Performance Enabled (Default: Balanced Enabled)
Secondary Power Settings
disabled - Intel Ready Mode Technology (Default: On)
disabled - Power Sense (Default: On)
After Power Failure: Power On (Default was stay off)

Over the weekend, I had received several emails from folks including Olli from the nucblog.net (highly recommend a follow if you do not), Florian from virten.net (another awesome blog which I follow & recommend) and few others who have gotten their hands on the "Skull Canyon" system. They had all tried to install the latest release of ESXi 6.0 Update 2 including earlier versions but all ran into a problem while booting up the ESXi installer.

~~The following error message was encountered:~~

Error loading /tools.t00
Compressed MD5: 39916ab4eb3b835daec309b235fcbc3b
Decompressed MD5: 000000000000000000000000000000
Fatal error: 10 (Out of resources)

Raymond Huh was the first individual who had reach out to me regarding this issue and then shortly after, I started to get the same confirmations from others as well. Raymond's suspicion was that this was related to the amount of Memory-Mapped I/O resources being consumed by the Intel Iris Pro GPU and does not leave enough resources for the ESXi installer to boot up. Even a quick Google search on this particular error message leads to several solutions here and here where the recommendation was to either disable or reduce the amount of memory for MMIO within the system BIOS.

Unfortunately, it does not look like the Intel NUC BIOS provides any options of disabling or modifying the MMIO settings after Raymond had looked which including tweaking some of the video settings. He currently has a support case filed with Intel to see if there is another option. In the mean time, I had also reached out to some folks internally to see if they had any thoughts and they too came to the same conclusion that without being able to modify or disable MMIO, there is not much more that can be done. There may be a chance that I might be able to get access to a unit from another VMware employee and perhaps we can see if there is any workaround from our side, but there are no guarantees, especially as this is not an officially supported platform for ESXi. I want to thank Raymond, Olli & Florian for going through the early testing and sharing their findings thus far. I know many folks are anxiously waiting and I know they really appreciate it!

For now, if you are considering purchasing or have purchased the latest Intel NUC Skull Canyon with the intention to run ESXi, I would recommend holding off or not opening up the system. I will provide any new updates as they become available. I am still hopeful that we will find a solution for the VMware community, so crossing fingers.