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vSphere UI Client Plugin named N/A after vSphere 8 upgrade

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This past weekend I finally got a chance to upgrade my personal homelab to vSphere 8, which went super smooth! As shared on Twitter and Mastadon, I started with my VCSA which was running vSphere 7.0 Update 3h and once that had completed and running for a couple of days, I then upgraded my single ESXi host which was running 7.0 Update 3g which runs on Supermicro E200-8D.

After was functional after the upgrade, including the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) UI Plugin 😀

This morning, I happened to navigate over to the vSphere UI Client Plugin screen under Administration->Solutions->Client Plugins and I noticed I had one plugin named "N/A" and was was showing incompatible.


I was not sure what the plugin was and raised this internally with the vSphere UI team on whether this was expected and if there was something I needed to do. It turns out this was the default vCloud Availability plugin for vCloud Director that ships with a vCenter Server deployment and it uses the deprecated local plugin architecture and this particular version of plugin is no longer applicable or compatible with vSphere 8.

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ESXi on Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast (Serpent Canyon)

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The Intel NUC Enthusiast product line is typically geared towards content creators and gamers. These Intel NUCs, include Skull Canyon, Hades Canyon and Phantom Canyon, are all equipped with an onboard discrete GPU.


The Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast, codenamed Serpent Canyon, is the latest offering in this product line and it is also the first Intel NUC that includes both an Intel CPU and an Intel GPU, which is based on the latest Intel Arc graphics.

Within the VMware Community, both the Skull Canyon and Hades Canyon were extremely popular due to the additional graphics and storage capabilities at the time. With my recent updated findings on iGPU passthrough for recent Intel NUCs with ESXi and the combined compute and graphics solution from this latest offering from Intel, Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast can make for a pretty powerful and capable VMware setup!

Let's take a closer look at the new Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast from a VMware point of view!

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Updated findings for passthrough of Intel NUC Integrated Graphics (iGPU) with ESXi

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While searching for drivers for another Intel NUC platform, I saw that Intel had recently published new graphic drivers for Linux including support for their new Intel Arc GPUs. This of course got me curious on wondering whether this would help at all with the issues regarding passthrough of the integrated graphics (iGPU) for recent Intel NUCs? ?

As a refresher, starting with the 11th Gen Intel NUCs, passthrough of the iGPU on Windows had stopped working and would result in the infamous Windows Error Code 43 and even worse on the 12th Gen Intel NUCs, Windows would simply BSOD after the initial reboot. The behavior is also simliar for Linux operating systems, while it better handles the issue by not crashing the OS, iGPU passthrough is also not functional for Linux systems.

To be honest, I had low expectations these new Linux graphic drivers would behave any differently, but I decided for the sake of persistency that I would give it one more go. I had access to both an Intel NUC 12 Extreme (Dragon Canyon) and Intel NUC 12 Pro (Wall Street Canyon), both of which included recent Intel iGPUs.

??? is the only way I could describe what I had discovered after my testing!

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