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vSphere UI Client Plugin named N/A after vSphere 8 upgrade

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This past weekend I finally got a chance to upgrade my personal homelab to vSphere 8, which went super smooth! As shared on Twitter and Mastadon, I started with my VCSA which was running vSphere 7.0 Update 3h and once that had completed and running for a couple of days, I then upgraded my single ESXi host which was running 7.0 Update 3g which runs on Supermicro E200-8D.

After was functional after the upgrade, including the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) UI Plugin 😀

This morning, I happened to navigate over to the vSphere UI Client Plugin screen under Administration->Solutions->Client Plugins and I noticed I had one plugin named "N/A" and was was showing incompatible.


I was not sure what the plugin was and raised this internally with the vSphere UI team on whether this was expected and if there was something I needed to do. It turns out this was the default vCloud Availability plugin for vCloud Director that ships with a vCenter Server deployment and it uses the deprecated local plugin architecture and this particular version of plugin is no longer applicable or compatible with vSphere 8.

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Virtual NUMA (vNUMA) and CPU Hot-Add support in vSphere 8

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While looking for something in the vSphere 8.0 API Reference, I stumbled onto a new VM configuration setting in vSphere 8 called exposeVnumaOnCpuHotadd which looks quite interesting and has the following description:

Capability to expose virtual NUMA when CPU hotadd is enabled. If set to true, ESXi will consider exposing virtual NUMA to the VM when CPU hotadd is enabled. If set to false, ESXi will enforce the VM to have single virtual NUMA node when CPU hotadd is enabled. If unset, the VM continue to follow the behavior in last poweron.

This actually reminded me of question that we got during one of our vSphere 8 Meet the Experts (MTE) sessions at VMware Explore Barcelona and whether there were any new enhancements to vNUMA when CPU hot-add is enabled, which I was not aware of any at the time. The vNUMA and CPU Hot-Add issue is detailed in this blog post by no other than my buddy Frank Denneman and here is a quick summary of the issue:

CPU Hot-Add is not compatible with vNUMA, if hot-add is enabled the virtual NUMA topology is not exposed to the guest OS and this may impact application performance.

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ESXi on Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast (Serpent Canyon)

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The Intel NUC Enthusiast product line is typically geared towards content creators and gamers. These Intel NUCs, include Skull Canyon, Hades Canyon and Phantom Canyon, are all equipped with an onboard discrete GPU.


The Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast, codenamed Serpent Canyon, is the latest offering in this product line and it is also the first Intel NUC that includes both an Intel CPU and an Intel GPU, which is based on the latest Intel Arc graphics.

Within the VMware Community, both the Skull Canyon and Hades Canyon were extremely popular due to the additional graphics and storage capabilities at the time. With my recent updated findings on iGPU passthrough for recent Intel NUCs with ESXi and the combined compute and graphics solution from this latest offering from Intel, Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast can make for a pretty powerful and capable VMware setup!

Let's take a closer look at the new Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast from a VMware point of view!

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