Ruby and Topaz is the latest in SimplyNUC's custom lineup of NUC-like systems which they started to build and sell a couple of years ago. The Ruby platform is based on the AMD Ryzen 4000 Series and the Topaz platform is based on Intel 11th Gen Tiger Lake Series.
Given the current global chip shortage that may last a couple more years, it may take some time before everyone can get their hands on either of these platforms, but I have slowly been seeing new inquiries about these platforms as folks are starting to receive their units. Of course, the most popular inquiry that I have received is whether these systems can be used with ESXi? 😀
Topaz
Since Topaz uses the same Intel 11th Gen Tiger Lake CPU, it works exactly the same as the Intel NUC 11 Performance (Panther Canyon) and Intel NUC 11 Pro (Tiger Canyon), which requires the Community Networking Driver for ESXi to enable both the 2.5GbE and 1GbE onboard network adapters when installing ESXi on Topaz. One really nice feature of Topaz is that all three models (i7, i5 and i3) include dual onboard network adapters, where as this option is only available on Intel NUC 11 Pro as an add-on card that must be purchased separately.
Here is screenshot of the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 2 release running on Topaz
Ruby
Although there was quite a bit of community interests in running ESXi on the Ruby platform, I was not particularly optimistic mainly because both the onboard network adapters are from Realtek. Since there are no ESXi networking drivers from Realtek, ESXi would not be able to detect either of the network adapters which is the same behavior that I have seen for other AMD-NUC like kits such as the ASRock Gen 1 and Gen 2 systems.
Unfortunately, there has been no progress with Realtek joining VMware's I/O Vendor Partner (IOVP), which would enable the development of an official network driver for ESXi. Although folks can add networking to these platforms leveraging the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi, it is less than ideal. At this point in time, I can not recommend Ruby or other AMD-based NUCs that uses Realtek-based network adapters.
Here is screenshot of ESXi 7.0 with USB network adapter running on Ruby
Nice article. Keep up the great work.
Its a shame that VMware ceded the SoHo market to Promox by dropping support for 3rd party drivers with 7.0 and so doesn't have any drivers nor any way to get them for the SoHo market leader AMD Ryzen/Realtek.
Sorry, these are all inaccurate statements.
1) Although I'm a huge advocate for enabling the VMware Community, especially for "consumer" platforms that can be used for VMware Homelabs. ESXi is an Enterprise grade Type-1 Hypervisor and there is a reason we have hardware compatibility list which are tested and validated by our hardware partners, not by VMware
2) VMware has an extremely rich 3rd party hardware eco-system. What was "dropped" in 7.0 was our vmklinux driver framework in favor of a more robust native driver (introduced back in 2013 https://williamlam.com/2013/10/esxi-55-introduces-new-native-device.html) which all of our hardware partners were made aware of and was given sufficient time to port their drivers over to ensure there was no impact to our customers. If a given device was no longer available, this was because the hardware partner decided it was no longer needed
3) Although it may have been "easier" to build a driver for vmklinux, it was still the responsibility of the hardware vendors to do so and Realtek has never taken part of our partner program whether it was for vmklinux or native drivers. In fact, I had been advocating with Realtke for a good 8+months to see if we could get them join our IOVP program (https://code.vmware.com/vmware-ready-programs/iovp), which is required to get access to the native driver SDK and sadly they've decided not to join
Ultimately, if you want to see a specific piece of hardware (server, network or storage) enabled for ESXi, I strongly recommend you share that feedback directly with the hardware vendor
Hello! Are you aware of any VIB drivers for ESXi7 for any 802.11ax USB devices? The ones on the fling listed are too old. I don't see anything on the HCL or of course on Realtek's site for their RTL8852A-based adapters that seem to be the main ones out there. They do give the driver C source to compile under Linux. Thanks, Dan
No there is not. Don't expect any unless Realtek decides to develop such a driver, which they have no plans per the last paragraph