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How to enable passthrough for USB Network Adapters claimed by ESXi CDCE Driver?

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As part of vSphere 7.0, ESXi now ships with a USB CDCE (Communication Device Class Ethernet) driver which can benefit customers with SB network adapters that support the CDCE specification as shared in this blog post HERE. This can especially be useful for those running a VMware Homelab where the onboard network adapter may not be supported and using a CDCE USB network adapter would allow you to install ESXi.

When a CDCE-supported USB network adapter is connected to an ESXi host, it will automatically be claimed by the CDCE driver as shown in the screenshot below.


If you are planning to use the USB network adapter for VMkernel traffic, then there is no workflow change like any other physical network adapter. However, if you intend to passthrough the USB network adapter to a VM, then you may find that it is not working as expected.


The reason for this is that ESXi has already claimed the USB device, assuming you wish to use it for VMkernel traffic. To change the behavior for a particular CDCE-supported USB network adapter, we just need to apply a USB Quirk which tells ESXi to ignore this adapter.

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ESXi configstorecli enhancement in vSphere 8.0 Update 1

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The ESXi configstorecli was introduced back in vSphere 7.0 Update 1 and provides access to the ESXi ConfigStore which responsible for centrally managing all configurations for an ESXi host instead of relying on different methods including a variety of configuration files, I highly recommend reviewing this refresher article HERE if you have not heard of the configstorecli before. The ESXi ConfigStore is also the underlying infrastructure that powers the new vSphere Configuration Profile feature which is also part of the vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) solution.

For those who currently or plan to automate ESXi installations using Kickstart, I wrote an article HERE last year on how to start converting some of your existing automation into using the new ESXi configstorecli, which is another article I recommend folks take a look if you have no already.

One of the challenges that I personally found when using configstorecli was purely figuring out the overall schema for the different components, groups and keys that are available. While I have demonstrated how to traverse the configstore in this blog post HERE, I still found experience less than ideal. I would have liked a bit more of an iterative exploration of the configstore itself and rather than showing the entire schema, I could slowly expect each node as configstore is a stored as a JSON document.

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ESXi on Intel NUC 13 Pro (Arena Canyon)

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A new year means a new Intel NUC with the latest generation of processors from Intel.


Today, Intel has launched the new Intel NUC 13 Pro, previously codenamed Arena Canyon NUC, which incorporates the latest Intel 13th Generation Raptor Lake CPU mobile processors and delivering that in the classic 4x4 Intel NUC form factor that many in the VMware community are quite familiar with.

At first glance, the Intel NUC 13 Pro looks exactly the same as the previous Intel NUC 12 Pro generation. In fact, the only visible difference on the outside between the 12th and 13th Generation Intel NUC Pro is that the Intel NUC 13 now has a new etched Intel NUC logo that is located on the top of the case on the lower left as shown in the screenshot above. Obviously, the changes with the Intel NUC 13 Pro is from within, so lets now take a closer look at the newest Intel NUC Pro and what it has to offer from a VMware Homelab perspective.

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