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ESXi on ASUS NUC 14 Performance (Scorpion Canyon)

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In addition to the ASUS NUC 14 Pro (which I recently reviewed), ASUS has also released the ASUS NUC 14 Performance (formally known as Scorpion Canyon) as part of their Intel 14th Generation (Meteor Lake) lineup.


Compared to the ASUS NUC 14 Pro and Pro+, the ASUS NUC 14 Performance offers more powerful CPU options and an additional NVIDIA discrete (mobile) graphics that can be used for a variety of use cases and workloads including the hot topic of AL/ML exploration.

Thanks to the SimplyNUC team who provided me access to the ASUS NUC 14 Performance kit for this review! Let's dive right in 😀

UPDATE (02/20/25) - 128GB (2x64GB) DDR5 SODIMM memory is fully functional with PN64-E1, please see this blog post for more information.

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Quick Tip - SSH Server, Client & Authorized Key Configurations for ESXi 8.0 Update 2 and later

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The general best practice is to disable SSH on your ESXi host by default and if/when you need access, you can turn it on temporarily and disable it when you have completed your task.

For users that need to modify the default SSH configurations whether that is on the server side, client side or setting up SSH authorized keys, this was historically accomplished by manipulating the various SSH configuration files and then reloading the service, if applicable.

With the introduction of the ESXi Configuration Store in vSphere 7.0 Update 1, the process is now different with ESXi 8.0 Update 2 and later for services that requires a configuration file to run such as SSH, NTP or SNMP to name a few.

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Quick Tip - Using PowerCLI to query VMware Tools Configuration at scale 

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One of the most powerful and versatile VM management capability in vSphere is the Guest Operations API, providing a rich set of operations from transferring files to/from the guest to running commands directly on the guest as if you were logged in!

An easy way to consume the Guest Operations API is via PowerCLI and using the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet, which I have extensively written about, showcasing all the creative ways this can be used to solve various automation challenges.

I recently came across a Reddit thread where the OP wanted to check to query for a specific VMware Tools configuration as part of the vSphere Security Configuration Guide and was looking for some help as logging into each and every system did not seem like a good idea, which it is NOT! 🙂

Any time you have a use case where you need to scale a specific operation (reading or writing) a change, you should consider Guest Operations API, you can easily use a single API to perform this operation at scale!

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