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Intel NUC 9 Pro & Extreme - First "Modular" NUC

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The highly anticipated "modular" Next Unit of Computing (NUC) has just been announced at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) this week, dubbed the Intel NUC 9 Pro (codename Quartz Canyon) and NUC 9 Extreme (codename Ghost Canyon). Boy am I super excited for this new platform and what it could mean for the VMware Community! ?

Immediately off the bat, you can see that this is not your typical NUC "cube" form factor. Intel has completely redesigned the system from the inside and out, more on this in a bit. The key difference between the two NUC 9 variants (Pro and Extreme) are the CPU options, which are detailed below. For the remainder of this article, I will be focusing on the Pro version of the NUC 9 and I will call out any differences where applicable.

The use of the word "Pro" is also quite fitting as Intel is positioning this system as a high-end prosumer to Mid-Enterprise device compared to the traditional NUC. The NUC 9 Pro is targeting more demanding workloads such as Digital Content Creation, CAD/Manufacturing and Financial Service applications that either require a high-end graphics card or AI module for computing. When I first heard about this system from Intel, it conceptually reminded me of Apple's recent 2019 Mac Pro, which is also designed with modularity in mind and can cater to a variety of use cases.

Speaking of use cases, although Virtualization is not a target use case for this new platform, VMware customers have been taking advantage of the Intel NUCs for a number of years now and it is still by far the most popular platform for running a vSphere/vSAN/NSX Home Lab. However, one common complaint I often hear about the current generations of NUCs has been its CPU and I think the new NUC 9 Pro/Extreme will be a nice contender for current alternatives like the popular Supermicro E200-8D. Thanks to Intel, I was able to get my hands on a pre-production NUC 9 Pro unit for testing, so lets take a closer look at what this new platform has to offer!

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Simulating the VMware Cloud on AWS API using Stoplight Prism Tool

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As more customers and partners on-board the VMware Cloud on AWS service, the topic of Automation has been coming up more frequently. There are a number of resources that are available to help users get started including here, here, here, here and here to just name a few.

Customers and partners can spin up 1-Node SDDC which includes the full stack (vSphere, vSAN and NSX-T), fully configured and ready for use for less than $8/hour (list price) and start exploring the rich APIs provided by the VMware Cloud on AWS service. Nothing beats playing with the real thing but we definitely have heard from customers and new developers that it would be nice to have the ability to test out some of the Automation prior to running against a real SDDC.

The VMware Cloud APIs is based on OpenAPI (formally Swagger) and has a very rich eco-system of tools that are available to developers and end-users. One really cool thing you can do with OpenAPIs is to "mock" or simulate the APIs just based on your API specification. This is really useful for API development but it can also come in handy for end users to be able to try out your APIs. Prism Mock by Stoplight is an OpenAPI mocking tool that was introduced to me by Jake Robinson.

Over the break, I finally found some time to play with this tool and I think this could be really useful for those wanting to get a taste of the various VMware Cloud APIs. As I have mentioned already, nothing beats the real APIs and there are some limitations with the mocking tool, so you should still consider using the real APIs when you are ready.

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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.