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ESXi on Intel NUC 10 (Frost Canyon)

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Just a heads up, if you are considering the latest 10th Generation of the Intel NUC (formally known as Frost Canyon) which are now available on Amazon, Newegg & SimplyNUC, there is an issue to be aware of. The onboard Intel NIC is not detected by ESXi which prevents the installer from proceeding. This issue was reported by a fellow reader named Ben who reached out to me over the holiday and with his help, I was able to get access to the system. It looks like the these NUCs have a newer version of I219-V NIC which is currently not recognized by either the vmklinux e1000 or ne1000 driver.

UPDATE (09/21/20) - The required ne1000 driver has been incorporated into ESXi 7.0 Update 1

UPDATE (08/21/20) - To disable the TPM 2.0 connection cannot be established message in ESXi, please see this blog post for more details.

UPDATE (01/20/20) - As shared on Twitter last Friday, we now have an updated ne1000 driver that will detect the Intel NIC found in the new 10th Gen NUC. You will need to replace the existing ne1000 driver with the new offline bundle, which can be downloaded from here. I would like to remind folks that the Intel NUC is not an officially supported platform from VMware and although have have enable this new system for the community, it does not mean this system or previous generations are supported.

There are two options to author a new ESXi Image Profile containing the ne1000 driver, the easiest method is if you have an existing vCenter Server and using the vSphere H5 Client and Image Builder UI. For more details, please take a look at this blog post for detailed instructions.

Application Discovery in vSphere with VMware Tools 11

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The holidays are just around the corner and hopefully everyone is taking some time off to spend with their families, I know I certainly will! As I start to wind down 2019, I like to use this time catch up on things in my backlog that I was not able to get to in the year. This can range from blog posts that I still need to read, to session recordings that I have attempted to watch but have only made it half way to random notes on topics to potentially investigate in.

When VMware Tools 11 was released back in September, I had noticed an interesting feature that was delivered as part of that release:

Added appInfo to publish information about running applications inside the guest.

I thought this might be something worth looking at when I found some time. One of the nice benefits of having VMware Tools de-coupled from a specific vSphere release is that VMware can now ship additional GuestOS capabilities to customers without requiring them to upgrade the entire vSphere infrastructure, which brings us to the new appInfo feature.

AppInfo is a new plugin within VMware Tools that enables the collection of the "raw" running application processes within a GuestOS. Once enabled, this information is then published into new VM guestinfo property called guestinfo.appinfo which can then be consumed by standard vSphere Automation Tools. This has been one of the most common VM Automation questions I have received over the years from customers and we can now provide additional insights to our administrators on the underlying applications and its version running within a Virtual Machine.

By default, this new AppInfo capability is enabled by default after installing VMware Tools 11 and is supported with both Windows and Linux GuestOS. If you wish to disable this feature, you can find the instructions here. Below is a Windows Server 2016 which I have Active Directory among other applications running which has the appInfo collection enabled.


Once enabled, the default collection period runs every 30 minutes which can be changed following the instructions mentioned earlier. To make this easier to consume, I wrote a quick PowerCLI function called Get-VMApplicationInfo.ps1 which expects a VM object and then retrieves the appInfo details. As part of the output, the results also includes the last discovered time along with an update counter which can be used to track the number of times the collection has ran since enabling.

UPDATE (08/03/20) - Just learned that the latest like VMware Tools 11.1 now includes supports for appInfo capability for Linux GuestOSes. Previously, this was only supported when using a Windows GuestOS but now customers can have this same visibility into their Linux systems. Here is an example running my PowerShell function against the latest TKG Guest Cluster Control Plane VM which you can see both standard Linux processes along with container processes for Kubernetes.

One thing I did notice is that we simply return all instances of a given process and that may or may not be ideal depending on your use case. I have updated my function to include a boolean switch called -UniqueOnly which will automatically filter out the duplicates as shown in the screenshot below.


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RSS feed for VMware release notes

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Staying up to date with the latest VMware product releases can be a challenge and with something like VMware Cloud on AWS, which is delivered as a service, it can be even more tricky as new updates are constantly being made available. Historically, there has not been a consistent method for how customers can get notified of new releases and this has also come up from our VMware Cloud on AWS customers.

We posed the challenge to our Information Exchange (documentation) team to see how we can help our VMware Cloud on AWS customers and the team came back with an initial implementation of providing a standard RSS feed which you can now find at the upper right hand corner of the VMware Cloud on AWS release notes page. You can subscribe using your favorite RSS reader, I personally use Feedly and when a new release of the SDDC and/or service, you will get notified via your RSS reader. For those that want a different delivery mechanism such as email for example, you can use the free If This, Than That (IFTTT) service which I also personally use and setup an email notification or any other type of notification that IFTTT supports.


Although this initial requirement was driven by the VMware Cloud on AWS product team, we definitely wanted to see this capability delivered across all VMware products and services which is what the team has done as well. When you navigate to a specific product and/or service release notes, you will now see the additional RSS feed that you can subscribe to.

Here are just a few of the popular RSS feeds that I know folks will want to subscribe to. For a complete list of all VMware product/services, please take a look here.

I think this be a great first step in helping our customers easily get notified of new releases, so that can start reviewing the release notes and start planning. I know many of you have also asked for other methods such as programmatic access to release notes updates or even having a specific changelog for things like our APIs. If folks have any feedback in this area, feel free to leave a comment and I will be more than happy to share this with our documentation team.