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Frigate NVR with Coral TPU & iGPU passthrough using ESXi on Intel NUC

05.22.2023 by William Lam // 3 Comments

For the past couple of weeks, I have been investigating some issues reported by the community when using ESXi with the popular Google Coral Edge TPU for accelerating machine learning (ML) inferencing. Fortunately, with the help from one of our engineers, Songtao, we were able to find a solution! You can find the complete write-up HERE and it also works with the latest ESXi 8.0 Update 1 release.

I was actually surprised at how popular the combination of the Google TPU and ESXi was from the community, which I guess should not come as a surprise, especially with the capabilities of ESXi coupled with all the interests in AI/ML these days.


Another popular use case of the Google TPU, which I had recently learned about is for real-time AI object detection using the Frigate NVR (Network Video Recorder) software, which is a commonly deployed solution that enable various home security and automation capabilities.

In fact, during a conversation with my buddy Alan Renouf, who is a Product Manager focused on running modern Edge workloads and is also a Frigate user, I discovered that the Frigate stack, which encompasses inferencing, video decoding, and the integration of cameras and sensors, closely resembles the components that you would find in many Edge deployments with simliar set of use cases.

Funny enough, I ended up leveraging a lot of my existing work with running ESXi on Intel NUCs and iGPU passthrough, while learning about and setting up Frigate! This was definitely an interesting project to explore and as shared, I now have a complete working setup with the full setup and write-up below.

JFYI - I have already submitted a PR 6576 to update the Frigate ESXi documentation as it is severely out of date and help folks quickly find the latest setup instructions.

Earlier this week I had no idea what Frigate NVR was ...

Today, full setup w/ESXi on Intel NUC (this thing is amazing, SO many use cases) 🥳

✅ Passthrough Google Coral USB TPU (inferencing)
✅ Passthrough Intel iGPU (vid
decoding)
✅ RTSP enabled camera #AlwaysBeLearning pic.twitter.com/Qghj7qwOFp

— William Lam (@*protected email*) (@lamw) May 18, 2023

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, ESXi, vSphere Tags // Coral, ESXi, Frigate, Intel NUC

Benefits of VM Templates (VMTX) in vSphere Content Library

05.16.2023 by William Lam // 11 Comments

A commonly miss-understood capability of the vSphere Content Library is managing and distributing Virtual Machine Templates (VMTX), which was introduced in vSphere 6.7 Update 2.

When vSphere Content Library was first released in vSphere 5.0, content was distributed by using a pull-based replication where the subscriber vCenter Server would setup initiate the content subscription to the publisher vCenter Server and then content would then be downloaded to the subscriber vCenter Server as shown in the diagram below.


This initial architecture of vSphere Content Library made it extremely easy for any vCenter Server, regardless of their vCenter Single Sign-On domain, to create a subscription and download content (ISO, OVF/OVA and other files) from the vSphere Content Library of the publisher vCenter Server.

The creation of the vSphere Content Library subscription was managed completely by the individual subscribing vCenter Server as long as it knew the subscription URL and any credentials that may have been configured and of course connectivity to the publisher vCenter Server. While this made it easy for anyone to subscribe content from a vSphere Content Library, it also meant for larger organizations with many vCenter Server(s), an additional task was required to configure each subscribing vCenter Server.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, vSphere 7.0, vSphere 8.0 Tags // content library, vmtx

Quick Tip - Preserving MachineGUID in Windows using vCenter Converter

05.15.2023 by William Lam // 7 Comments

When using the popular vCenter Converter tool for performing a Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) or Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) migration of Microsoft Windows, the MachineGuid (HKLM->SOFTWARE->Microsoft->Cryptography->MachineGuid) can change based on your migration settings.


By default, the Reconfigure destination virtual machine option is selected to help ensure the converted virtual machine will properly start in the destination environment as outlined in the vCenter Converter documentation.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, vSphere Tags // MachineGUID, vCenter Converter

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC) across Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud

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Recent

  • ESXi on ASUS PN64-E1 05/24/2023
  • vSphere Pods using VDS based Supervisor in vSphere with Tanzu? 05/23/2023
  • Frigate NVR with Coral TPU & iGPU passthrough using ESXi on Intel NUC 05/22/2023
  • 96GB SODIMM memory for DDR5 system with ESXi 05/18/2023
  • Refresher on Nested ESXi Networking Requirements 05/17/2023

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