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Supported chipsets for the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling

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A longtime community favorite, the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling makes it super easy for users to expand additional networking capabilities for ESXi-x86.

While helping a customer recently, I realized that we did not have a published list of supported USB Network adaptors (VID/DID) for the Fling anywhere, especially after transitioning into the Broadcom system post Day 2.

Note: A quick heads up, the Fling downloads will be re-homed to the Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) under the Free Downloads next month. For more details, please see the announcement posted on the Flings Community.

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ESXi on GMKtec NucBox K11

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The GMKtec NucBox has been growing in popularity amongst the VMware community as a modern AMD Ryzen-based alternative to the Intel/ASUS NUC, offering many of the same advantages while avoiding some of the drawbacks of Intel's Hybrid CPU architecture.

In preparation for my upcoming session at the inaugural VMUG Connect Conference in April, I have been experimenting with several modern hardware options, with the goal of deploying the full VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) solution for use within a lab environment, while still staying budget friendly!

I know several folks have had great success with the GMKtec NucBox K8 Plus and it just so happens, while browsing the GMKtec website, I noticed an additional NucBox has just been released called the K11.


While the differences between the K8 Plus and K11 is pretty minimal, I was interested in validating some new hardware add-ons, so getting the latest hardware would hopefully give me the best chance!

In collaboration with the VMware {Code} team, I was able to get hands on with the latest GMKtec NucBox K11!

UPDATE (06/25/25) - The K11 can be used to run VCF 9.0, but you will NOT be able to run VCF Automation (VCFA). You can see how I have used the K11 is used in a "Hybrid" configuration in this blog post under Scenario 3.

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Enable TRIM/UNMAP from Nested vSAN OSA/ESA to physical vSAN OSA

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If you are running Nested vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) or vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) workloads on top of a physical vSAN OSA setup, you may want to enable the Guest TRIM/UNAMP capability, which would allow your the "inner" (Nested) workloads to pass the TRIM/UNMAP requests down into your physical vSAN OSA deployment for space reclamation.

It was recently observed that storage utilization may continue to increase on a physical vSAN OSA setup even when the Nested vSAN ESA/OSA workloads have already freed up their storage, which is due to the fact that the TRIM/UNAMP commands are not being passed down into the physical vSAN OSA. If you are using vSAN ESA for your physical setup, Guest TRIM/UNMAP is already enabled by default, so this is only applicable if you are using vSAN OSA.

To enable the Guest TRIM/UNMAP capability, you need apply the following ESXi Advanced Setting to your physical vSAN OSA.

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