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ESXi on ASUS NUC 14 Performance (Scorpion Canyon)

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In addition to the ASUS NUC 14 Pro (which I recently reviewed), ASUS has also released the ASUS NUC 14 Performance (formally known as Scorpion Canyon) as part of their Intel 14th Generation (Meteor Lake) lineup.


Compared to the ASUS NUC 14 Pro and Pro+, the ASUS NUC 14 Performance offers more powerful CPU options and an additional NVIDIA discrete (mobile) graphics that can be used for a variety of use cases and workloads including the hot topic of AL/ML exploration.

Thanks to the SimplyNUC team who provided me access to the ASUS NUC 14 Performance kit for this review! Let's dive right in 😀

UPDATE (02/20/25) - 128GB (2x64GB) DDR5 SODIMM memory is fully functional with PN64-E1, please see this blog post for more information.

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Quick Tip - SSH Server, Client & Authorized Key Configurations for ESXi 8.0 Update 2 and later

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The general best practice is to disable SSH on your ESXi host by default and if/when you need access, you can turn it on temporarily and disable it when you have completed your task.

For users that need to modify the default SSH configurations whether that is on the server side, client side or setting up SSH authorized keys, this was historically accomplished by manipulating the various SSH configuration files and then reloading the service, if applicable.

With the introduction of the ESXi Configuration Store in vSphere 7.0 Update 1, the process is now different with ESXi 8.0 Update 2 and later for services that requires a configuration file to run such as SSH, NTP or SNMP to name a few.

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Quick Tip - Monitoring ESXi remote syslog forwarding

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When an ESXi host is unable to forward its logs to a remote syslog server, a VMkernel Observation (VOB) is automatically raised by the host and it can be used to proactively alert administrators, which has been possible since ESXi 5.0 .... per this blog post from 2012 after some Googling! ??

While I was pretty confident the behavior described above still holds true for our latest ESXi 7.x and 8.x releases, I wanted to be sure before responding back to a colleague. I deployed the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 3q and ESXi 8.0 Update 3b and after configuring syslog forwarding, I disabled the NIC on my Aria Operations for Logs to simulate a network disconnect and I saw the following log entry in /var/log/vobd.log

2024-09-28T21:12:00.298Z: [UserLevelCorrelator] 7452916537us: [esx.problem.vmsyslogd.remote.failure] The host "192.168.30.62:514" has become unreachable. Remote logging to this host has stopped.

By default, ESXi will attempt to retry the remote syslog connection after the configured timeout (default 180 seconds), which is a relatively new configuration option that is available with ESXCLI (esxcli system syslog config set --default-timeout XX).

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