WilliamLam.com

  • About
    • About
    • Privacy
  • VMware Cloud
  • Tanzu
    • Application Modernization
    • Tanzu services
    • Tanzu Community Edition
    • Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
    • vSphere with Tanzu
  • Home Lab
  • Nested Virtualization
  • Apple
You are here: Home / ESXi / Disabling TPM 2.0 connection cannot be established message in ESXi for Intel NUC 10

Disabling TPM 2.0 connection cannot be established message in ESXi for Intel NUC 10

08.21.2020 by William Lam // 2 Comments

For Intel NUC 10 (Frost Canyon) owners who have installed ESXi may have noticed that even after disabling Intel's Trusted Platform Module (TPM), the following warning message "TPM 2.0 device detected but a connection cannot be established." is still being displayed in the vSphere UI as shown in the screenshot below. 


Thanks to Reddit member mscaff and casperette who recently discovered and confirmed that the latest BIOS (FN0044) resolves an issue where disabling TPM in the BIOS was not actually working which would explain the behavior observed above. The really interesting thing is that I had initially ran into this problem several months back and after speaking with some internal VMware folks, I was able to get rid of this message without this update. This involved installing Windows 10 and clear the TPM keys which may have still been cache but since then, it has not been reproducible by other folks. In any case, it is always recommended to check and update to latest BIOS to ensure you have all the latest bug fixes.

Lastly, Intel states support for TPM 2.0 for these NUCs, so why is ESXi complaining? Well, it has to do with the interface type and not with SHA1 vs SHA256 which are both supported on the NUC 10. The NUC only supports CRB but proper compliant TPM 2.0 chip must support FIFO which is not configurable the last time I had checked. For more detail requirements and configuration of TPM 2.0 on ESXi, please refer to this blog post.

More from my site

  • Quick Tip - Adding a vTPM (Virtual Trusted Platform Module) to a Nested ESXi VM
  • ESXi on Intel NUC 12 Extreme (Dragon Canyon)
  • Considerations for future vSphere Homelabs due to upcoming removal of SD card/USB support for ESXi
  • ESXi on Intel NUC 11 Extreme (Beast Canyon)
  • Passthrough of Intel Iris Xe Integrated GPU on 11th Gen NUC results in Error Code 43
Share this...
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Linkedin
  • Reddit
  • Pinterest

Categories // ESXi, Home Lab Tags // Frost Canyon, Intel NUC, TPM

Comments

  1. Bill says

    02/12/2021 at 7:22 am

    Is there no way to disable/supress the message?

    Reply
    • Steve says

      04/03/2021 at 11:43 pm

      Same question

      Reply

Thanks for the comment! Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Search

Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

Connect

  • Email
  • GitHub
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo

Support

Recent

  • A first look at the new vSphere+ & vSAN+ Cloud Service 07/01/2022
  • Quick Tip - Prepare VMware Photon OS for use with vSphere Guest OS Customization and cloud-init 06/29/2022
  • Using the new vSphere Guest OS Customization with cloud-init in vSphere 7.0 Update 3 06/27/2022
  • How to forcefully disconnect a vSphere VM Console session? 06/24/2022
  • Quick Tip - Using ESXi Scripted Installation (kickstart) to configure IPv6 networking 06/21/2022

Advertisment

Copyright WilliamLam.com © 2022

 

Loading Comments...