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Aquantia 10GbE ESXi Driver for Apple 2018 Mac Mini

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I know many of you have been anxiously waiting for ESXi to be fully functional on the latest Apple Mac Mini (2018), unfortunately I do not have any news to share with you on that front. Without help from Apple, we are still challenged with Apple's new T2 chip, which prevents us from accessing the underlying NVMe device.

UPDATE (04/27/20) - Marvell (formally Aquantia) has just released an official Native ESXi Driver for their AQtion based network adaptors which you can find here and for the complete list of supported devices using this driver, please refer to the VMware HCL here.

Having said that, I do have some exciting news regarding the built-in 10Gigabit Ethernet adaptor on the 2018 Mac Mini. The 10GbE adaptor uses an Aquantia chipset, this is also the same chipset used in Apple's high end iMac Pro which was released earlier in the year. Over the past few weeks, I have been working with the Aquantia team and they have successfully ported over their open source Atlantic driver to a VMKlinux driver for ESXi, which they have published here. Although the local NVMe device can not be used to run any VMs, with the network fully enabled, customers could take advantage of this model and connect to IP-based storage to start leveraging the new Mac Mini platform.

The easiest way to incorporate the driver into the latest ESXi release is to use Image Builder within the vSphere H5 Client UI, below are the step-by-step instructions.

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ESXTOP and VMware Cloud on AWS

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ESXTOP is one of the most versatile and popular tool in the VI Administrators tool belt when it comes to real time performance analysis and data collection in a vSphere environment. In fact, ESXTOP also came up in the most recent episode of the VirtuallySpeaking Podcast covering the Top 10 Tools for VI Administrators, which Duncan Epping and I had the pleasure to be part of.

To use ESXTOP, you are required to SSH to an ESXi host as it is only available in the ESXi Shell. Traditionally, this has not been a huge issue for on-premises environment, especially as you can enable access when you needed to run ESXTOP. However, when operating on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC), customers no longer have to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure and can now focus on being a consumer of the VMware SDDC. One side affect of this operational change is that customers do not have direct access to ESXi and would not be able to use ESXTOP.

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64GB memory on the Intel NUCs?

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I just got my hands on a pair of 32GB SODIMM memory modules (64GB total) which I had been waiting to evaluate since last Fall. Apparently, it has taken some time for these high capacity memory modules to be readily available in the consumer market. Even after the announcement of the new 2018 Apple Mac Mini last year, which officially supports 32GB SODIMMS, I was not aware of any vendors who were selling these modules direct to consumers.


My primary interests in these memory modules was whether they would work on the latest Intel NUCs, specifically the Hades Canyon (NUC8i7HNK) which are the prosumer versions of the standard Intel NUCs that many folks use for vSphere Home Labs. Both the standard and Skull/Hades Canyon NUCs all officially support a maximum of 32GB of memory (2x16GB SODIMM), however it been hypothesized by the community that they *should* in theory be able to go up to 64GB, especially as some of the newer CPUs technically state support for it.

UPDATE (10/30/20) - Thanks to Ariel Sanchez who shared the Crucial 2x32GB SO-DIMM also work with the Intel NUC. It was a killer deal during Amazon Prime week, at $164 for 2x32 (64GB) but as of right now, they are going for $219 which is still cheaper than the Samsung which are going for $120 per 32GB SO-DIMM.

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