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96GB SODIMM memory for DDR5 system with ESXi

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Back in February of this year, I had shared that non-binary 24GB and 48GB SODIMM memory was finally available, but I quickly realized that the news from Samsung was only for traditional memory modules and not the laptop SODIMM memory, which is also commonly used in small form factor systems like an Intel NUC.

Three months later, we still have no word from either Samsung or Crucial, but recently Mushkin came out of no where and released their 48GB DDR5 SODIMM modules which I had also shared the news on my blog HERE. While DDR5 adoption is slowly increasing, there are not many systems out there right now that currently supports DDR5 and you will need a DDR5 capable system to use DDR5 memory.


I recently got my hands on a new DDR5 system, which I will share more details in a future blog post, but the maximum supported memory listed for the system is still 64GB. I was curious on whether these new 48GB SODIMM would actually work with this system? If we go back to 2019, when 32GB SODIMM was first released, it was not clear whether these would work with systems that listed 32GB as their maximum supported memory?

I was the first to confirm 32GB modules worked with the popular Intel NUCs back in 2019 and that I could even use these new SODIMM modules going all the way back to an Intel 6th Gen NUC, which was released back in 2016! So while the officially tested memory limit was only 32GB, the CPU actually supported more than that!

??I decided to take another chance and I purchased the Mushkin 96GB DDR5 SODIMM 4800mhz kit which has just arrived and I have put my theory to the test again ...

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Refresher on Nested ESXi Networking Requirements

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Using Nested Virtualization and specifically Nested ESXi, which is running ESXi inside of a VM, has become so automatic and second nature for me and many in the VMware community, that I sometimes forget we still have brand new users who are experiencing ESXi for the very first time.

Nested ESXi is an extremely powerful capability for so many different use cases from development, testing and general learning purposes. Before jumping in and deploying your Nested ESXi environment, which I highly recommend using my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances, you need to make sure that you have proper networking setup or you will run into all sorts of strange issues. For all VMware Nested Virtualization resources, tips and tricks, you will definitely want to bookmark this page HERE.

Disclaimer: Nested Nested ESXi is not officially supported by VMware and Nested Virtualization is only supported under limited scenarios. For more details, please refer to this VMware KB 2009916.

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Google Coral USB Edge TPU Accelerator on ESXi

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Several weeks back, I came across a really strange post on the VMTN communities asking how to change the Device ID (DID) and Vendor ID (VID) for a USB Device that has been passthrough to a VM from ESXi? The device in question is the Google Coral USB Edge TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) Accelerator, which is a relatively in-expensive device that can help accelerate machine learning (ML) inferencing. With all the buzz these days with Generative AI and ChatGPT, I can only imagine its popularity has grown even further but I did not realize how popular this device has been in the community, especially for those wanting to use it with ESXi.

The initial observation reported by this user and also by many others in the Coral community was that ESXi was showing the incorrect VID/DID for the Coral USB device and because of this, it was not working correctly when passthrough'ed to a VM and they were looking for a way to change the DID/VID value from 1a6e:089a (Global Unichip Corp.) to 18d1:9302 (Google Inc.).

Interestingly enough, a couple of weeks ago, my buddy Alan Renouf had also shared that he recently purchased the Coral USB device, so I figured I would check with him first to see if he was observing the same behavior that was being reported, which he was. I had been going through the Github reports to try better understand the issue and some of the previous workarounds that users had done including disabling the vmkusb module, which I definitely not recommended, especially for more recent releases of ESXi where that will simply disable all USB functionality to your ESXi host.

I still could not wrap my head around the issue as the reports did not make any sense in terms of the DID/VID not being claimed correctly or that it needed to change to properly function. This also did not make sense when speaking with our USB expert (Songtao who also developed our USB Network Native Driver for ESXi), so I decided to bite the bullet and purchase the Coral USB device, which apparently is difficult to obtain unless you overpay on Amazon, which I did.

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