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ESX Passthrough of AMD Ryzen Integrated Graphics (iGPU)

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I recently had a conversation with Wenchao (creator of AMD Zen4/Zen5 IPMI Thermal Driver for ESX Fling and Realtek Network Driver for ESX Fling) about the incredible work he has done to support the VMware/Broadcom community. His latest contributions has really closed the capability gap when running ESX on popular AMD Ryzen platforms like the Minisforum MS-A2, which been an ideal system for running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 in a lab environment.

The only remaining capability we have not yet been able to take advantage of is the integrated graphics (iGPU) on modern AMD Ryzen systems, which have become surprisingly powerful for running AI models.

While this has been a topic I have researched quite extensively and even spent time debugging with Engineering, it is always great to get a new perspective on things. I kid you not, a few days later Wenchao came back with a solution that had a few caveats which I was able to help iron out with some of my prior experience in this area. 😆

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VCF 9.1 - Comprehensive ESX Configuration Workarounds for Lab Deployments

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With the announcement of VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1, I know many of you are eager to start planning for 9.1 and get it into your lab environment for hands-on experience as the first step toward pre-production validation.

Unless you are among the few with adequate resources, including servers listed on the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG), most lab environments are resource constrained in one way or another.

To help expedite your 9.1 deployment for non-production usage, I have documented the various ESX configuration workarounds that can used for lab deployments, especially for functional testing and/or for educational purpose.

I will continue to update this page with new information, so be sure to bookmark for your single reference!

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AMD Zen4/Zen5 IPMI Thermal Driver for ESX Fling

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Happy Friday! 🥳

A couple of weeks back, Wenchao (creator of the Realtek Network Driver for ESX Fling) reached out to me to share an exciting development he had been working on.

Unlike traditional enterprise hardware, which typically includes an Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) for exposing various hardware statistics, consumer systems like the popular Minisforum MS-A2 lack this capability out of the box.

Wenchao has developed a pseudo-IPMI driver for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 platforms that surfaces the CPU thermal and I am excited to share this will be released as a new Fling!


In addition to viewing this information via the vSphere UI, users can also retrieve the raw metrics via ESXCLI:

esxcli hardware ipmi sdr list


The driver currently supports the following:

  • ESX 9.1
  • ESX 9.0.x
  • ESX 8.0 Update 3

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