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Considerations for future vSphere Homelabs due to upcoming removal of SD card/USB support for ESXi

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In case you have not heard the news, VMware had recently published a new knowledge base article (KB 85685) outlining details for the future removal of SD card/USB as a standalone boot device for ESXi.

If you have not read the KB, please take a few minutes and carefully read the article, especially as you think about future hardware upgrades and purchases.

There has certainly been no shortage of discussions and debates since the publishing of the VMware KB. One topic that I know many of you have been wondering and asking about is what is the impact to vSphere Homelabs? This was something that had already crossed my mind after I first read the KB and I was thinking about this a bit more this week and specifically some of the potential options that are available to customers right now but also some of the considerations you may want to account for in with future homelab upgrades.

Disclaimer: These are my own personal opinions and do not reflect any official guidance or recommendations from VMware.

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ESXi on Intel NUC 11 Extreme (Beast Canyon)

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The NUC 11 Extreme (codenamed Beast Canyon) is the latest in Intel's Tiger Lake based NUC lineup which includes the NUC 11 Performance (Panther Canyon), NUC 11 Enthusiast (Phantom Canyon) and NUC 11 Pro (Tiger Canyon). As you can see from the picture above, the codename for the NUC 11 Extreme is quite fitting as this is currently the largest "NUC" that Intel has built to date, coming in at 8L. Yes, this is definitely "stretching" the NUC label in terms of what folks historically expect but I believe Intel is simply expanding on their well known NUC brand, especially as there are also NUC laptops.

However, this is also not the first time Intel has explored a larger NUC design. In 2020, Intel introduced the NUC 9 Pro (Quartz Canyon) and Extreme (Ghost Canyon) which took advantage of the new NUC Compute Element and enabled a new modular design and form factor adding support for discrete GPU and PCIe expandability. As a successor to the NUC 9, the NUC 11 Extreme extends this concept further by adding support for a full length discrete GPU, which is the primary driver for the larger form factor.

The NUC 11 Extreme can also enhance your homelab experience with LED lights which are located underneath the chassis and on the front with the classic Intel NUC Skull. Even cooler, the design in the front is customizable and can be user replaced with a different graphic. For an example of what this could look like, jump down to the customizable logo section of this blog post 🙂

I know there are a number of folks in the VMware community who are currently using the NUC 9 for their VMware Homelab, especially for those with GPU and/or additional network and storage requirements. Let's now take a closer look at what the NUC 11 Extreme has to offer the VMware Community.

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Introduction to the new ESXi Configuration Store CLI (configstorecli)

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I was looking into a customer inquiry this morning and found myself looking at the configstorecli, which is an ESXi Shell CLI that enables access to the new ESXi Configuration Store (ConfigStore). The goal of the ConfigStore, initially introduced in ESXi 7.0 Update 1, is to centrally manage all configurations for an ESXi host instead of relying on different methods including a variety of configuration files. There is actually not much documentation out there for configstorecli, other than this blog post by Duncan and these two VMware KBs (here and here).

While searching online, I ended up clicking Duncan's blog as I figured it probably has the best information and I do recall this topic awhile back on the change in behavior for renaming a standard virtual switch. I started to play with the configstore CLI and what was not immediately clear was how to actually use it, especially identifying some of the parameters it was looking for. I figured I might as well share some of my findings as I explore configstorecli a bit more.

My first observation is that the Config Store is a JSON document store and each configuration is stored as individual JSON documents. Before you can access a specific configuration, you first need to understand the schema. To view the entire schema, run the following command:

configstorecli schema list

Since the output is JSON, you can actually save the contents to a file on your desktop and use any JSON supported tool such as jq to explore further. In the example below, I have loaded an online copy of the configstorecli output from ESXi 7.0 Update 2 using my Chrome browser, which has this JSON Viewer extension installed. The benefit with a visual tool, is that you can easily expand or collapse specific nodes within the JSON document.

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