ESXi on ASUS NUC 14 Pro (Revel Canyon)

The ASUS NUC 14 Pro (formally known as Revel Canyon) is the first ASUS-based NUC since the acquisition of the NUC Division from Intel last fall. I know many of my readers have been requesting a review of the new ASUS NUCs, but to be honest, it has been pretty difficult to get samples directly from ASUS, which was not the case when I had worked with Intel.

In fact, it was thanks to the folks over at SimplyNUC who was kind enough to provide access to the ASUS NUC 14 Pro, so that I could do a proper review 🙏

In case you are reading this ASUS, I hope this was simply due to the initial integration of the NUC Division and in the future, getting early samples will be possible to help support our shared community of users.

At first glance, the exterior chassis of the ASUS NUC 14 Pro has minimal changes, it is the same classic 4x4 design that we have all come to love. The only noticeable change is the raised bevel on the top of the chassis and the removal of the etched Intel NUC brand which was located on top.

Compute

The ASUS NUC 14 Pro uses the new Intel 14th Generation (Meteor Lake) processors, which is part of the new Intel Core Ultra Processor (Series 1) brand and includes both Core Ultra 5 & Ultra 7 processors (with and without Intel vPro):

• Intel Core Ultra 5 (125H & 135H)
• Intel Core Ultra 7 (155H & 165H)
• Intel Core Ultra 5 w/vPro (135H)
• Intel Core Ultra 7 w/vPro (155H)

Unlike with previous generations of the Intel Hybrid CPU processors like the Intel 12th Gen (Alder Lake) or 13th Gen (Raptor Lake), where there are two types of CPU Cores: P-Core (Performance) and E-Core (Efficiency), Meteor Lake introduces a brand new architecture that now includes a third type of CPU core called Low-Power Efficiency Cores (LPE-Core).

For example, the ASUS NUC 14 Pro kit that I am using has an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H which includes 6 x P-Cores, 8 E-Cores & 2 x LPE-Cores. By using CPU-Z to benchmark the individual cores, I have observed the following association across P, E & LPE-Cores for those interested in applying specific CPU affinities:

An important thing to note is that LPE-Cores can NOT be disabled in the system BIOS and this means from an ESXi perspective, regardless of disabling the P-Cores or E-Cores, you will always have two types of non-uniform processors, which will require using the ESXi kernel option to boot a system with non-uniform CPU processors. Furthermore, in the past you could disable just the E-Cores which means only the P-Cores would be visible to ESXi and you could benefit from Hyperthreading.

With Meteor Lake processors, because LPE-Cores can not be disabled, you will not be able to benefit from Hyperthreading as ESXi will automatically disable that because of the non-uniform CPU cores. On a related topic to Hyperthreading, Intel has announced that they will be removing the Hyperthreading technology with the next generation of Intel processors with the Lunar Lake architecture, so just something to be aware of going forward.

For memory, the ASUS NUC 14 Pro can support up to 96GB (2 x SODIMM) using the new 48GB DDR5 non-binary SO-DIMM memory modules, which I have shared my experience with using the Mushkin Redline in the past.

Network

The classic 4x4 ASUS NUC 14 Pro comes with a single Intel i226 (2.5GbE) network adaptor that is fully recognized by ESXi 8.x and later. There is also an option for a "Tall" SKU of the ASUS NUC 14 Pro which would allow you to add a secondary Intel i226 (2.5GbE) network adaptor using the expansion module, which needs to be purchased separately.

For additional networking, you can also use the two Thunderbolt 4 ports with these Thunderbolt 10GbE solutions for ESXi or use USB-based networking with the popular USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling, supporting over two dozen types of USB-based network adapters.

Storage

The ASUS 14 NUC Pro supports 1 x M.2 PCIe x4 Gen 4 (2280) and 1 x M.2 PCIe x4 Gen 4 (2242) using the M-Key interface, which is completely brand new compared to the previous Intel NUC 13 pro which only supported an M.2 SATA using a B-Key interface. This means you can have two NVMe devices that can then be used in various combinations from vSAN OSA/ESA or local VMFS on one device and NVMe Tiering for the second device! If you go with the "Tall" SKU of the ASUS NUC 14 Pro, you will have an additional SATA interface supporting 2.5" SSD or HDD, giving you more storage deployment options.

Since the 2242 slot is now an M-Key interface, I needed to purchase a new NVMe device since my existing 2242 device was only for SATA. I got lucky with the Corsair MP600 (1TB) M.2 (2242) NVMe, which was fully recognized by ESXi 8.x and later.

If you need additional storage, you can also use the two Thunderbolt 4 ports and add these Thunderbolt M.2 NVMe solutions for ESXi providing you with more storage capacity and configuration options.

In terms of physical memory and storage installation, the ASUS NUC 14 Pro has a nice enhancement using a quick release toggle (highlighted in red above), removing the need to manually unscrew the four connected screws on each corner, which is how you normally would remove the bottom chassis from the last few generations of the Intel NUCs.

Graphics

The ASUS NUC 14 Pro includes an Intel Arc integrated graphics (iGPU) with eight X^e-Cores and can be successfully passthrough to an Ubuntu VM, which has support for the latest Intel Graphics Drivers. For setup instructions, please refer to this blog post HERE.

Note: iGPU passthrough to a Windows VM is not functional with the Intel Graphics Driver for Windows which throws Error Code 43.

AI Accelerator

An exciting new capability to the ASUS NUC 14 Pro is an integrated Neural Processing Unit or NPU that is built right into the Meteor  Lake SoC (system-on-chip) that is optimized for low power AI Inferencing. The great news is that the Intel NPU can also be used by ESXi and for more setup details and usage, check out my recent blog post HERE.

For those interested in an ASUS NUC 14 Pro for the purpose of exploring and learning about AI/ML, SimplyNUC has a nice promotion where you can request a $500 discount code off of their SimplyNUC AI PC Development Kit.

ESXi

The latest release of ESXi 8.0 Update 3 runs on the ASUS NUC 14 Pro without any issues, no additional drivers are required as the Community Networking Driver for ESXi has been productized as part of the ESXi 8.0 release. If you want to install ESXi 7.x, you will need to use of the Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling to recognize the onboard network devices.

As mentioned earlier, due to non-uniform CPU cores that will exists across P, E and LPE-Cores, you will need to apply the required ESXi kernel option to boot a system with non-uniform CPU processors.

Since the ASUS NUC 14 Pro is capable of 2 x NVMe devices, I was able to use one of them for enabling the new NVMe Tiering capability and with a configured ratio to be 400%, it gave me ~478GB of memory for my workloads! 😁

One thing that I was curious about was whether the new CPU architecture introduced with Meteor Lake would impact running heavier workloads like running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) using Nested ESXi on a single physical host, which is currently my go to workload when pushing the boundaries of NVMe Tiering as it requires at least 384GB of memory to deploy.

In my testing, I have observed that the lower-end SKUs of Meteor Lake may struggle with deploying VCF. I have experienced several PSODs while VCF was deploying vCenter Server, so the deployment never actually finishes. I did experiment with CPU affinity for a bit since the LPE-Cores on the lower-end SKU only run at 700Mhz compared to some of the higher end SKUs that can go up to 1Ghz, but the results was very inconsistent that I can not recommend doing this on just a single node. I think if you have several of the ASUS NUC 14 Pro, that you could certainly have a much better experience.

While running VCF in a nested environment on a single physical ASUS NUC 14 Pro may not be possible, it still offers plenty of resources through the use of NVMe Tiering to run more than what the physical DRAM can support, which is always a welcome addition when look at doing more with less! I will also be reviewing another ASUS-based NUC that I have had success with deploying VCF on a single host, so that might be of interest to my readers when that review is up. I also want to make it clear that you can definitely use NVMe Tiering to help deploy VCF on the physical ASUS NUC 14 Pro, rather than doing Nested ESXi and having several of these kits could be a nice alternative to larger systems.