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How to disable the Efficiency Cores (E-cores) on an Intel NUC?

03.24.2023 by William Lam // 3 Comments

The Intel 12th Generation (Alder Lake) CPU is the first Intel consumer CPU that introduces a new hybrid big.LITTLE CPU architecture. This new hybrid Intel CPU architecture integrates two types of CPU cores: Performance-cores (P-cores) and Efficiency-cores (E-cores) into the same physical CPU die. For more information about this new hybrid Intel CPU design, check out this resource HERE.

These new hybrid Intel CPUs have also become the defacto standard for the Intel NUCs starting with the 12th Generation Intel NUCs (Dragon Canyon, Wall Street Canyon & Serprent Canyon), which were released last year. While the ESXi scheduler does not support or understand this new consumer CPU architecture, it can function with ESXi but does require an ESXi kernel boot option, which I have documented HERE, that tells ESXi to ignore the CPU differences.

While this has been an acceptable workaround, there are no guarantees on how the ESXi scheduler will behave. Furthermore, you will also not benefit from Hyper-threading (HT) on the P-cores as the E-cores do not contain HT-enabled cores and hence HT is also disabled by ESXi. A slightly better workaround is to actually disable the E-cores, which would give you uniform CPU P-cores and also access to HT. During my initial investigation, I was never able to figure out how to disable the E-cores within the Intel NUC BIOs and I had assumed it was just not possible.

I recently had re-inquired about this configuration change and came to learn that it is possible to change both the P-core and E-core settings within the Intel NUC BIOs, it was just not very intuitive!

[Read more...]

Categories // Home Lab Tags // Intel NUC

SSD with multiple NVMe namespaces for VMware Homelab

03.14.2023 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

If space is a constraint for your VMware Homelab, you may want to consider using SSDs that can support multiple NVMe Namespaces. I first came to learn about NVMe namespaces and its benefits back in 2019 when it was first demonstrated by Micron and using it vSAN, which was also the primary use case I had in mind.

While interesting, I eventually concluded that support for multiple NVMe namespaces was only available in higher-end Enterprise SSDs, which is typically outside of the affordability range for most homelab environments. Another challenge that I found with SSDs that supported multiple NVMe namespaces, is that the interface uses a U.2 connector versus the popular M.2, which is what you would typically find in a homelab setup. This also limited the applicability of these SSDs as you would need a motherboard with a U.2 interface.

I recently had revisited the topic of NVMe namepaces as I came across the PM9A3 from Samsung, which not only supported multiple NVMe namespaces, but it was also reasonable priced ($143 for 960GB at the time of purchase). My ultimate goal was to see if I could use the 2.5" SSD in a small form factor system that only has an M.2 slot and slice up the NVMe namespace for ESXi installation + ESX-OSDATA, vSAN and even additional VMFS volumes.

[Read more...]

Categories // Home Lab Tags // homelab, namespaces, NVMe

Interesting VMware Homelab Kits for 2023

03.08.2023 by William Lam // 19 Comments

Similiar to my post last year on interesting VMware Homelab Kits for 2022, I figured it was time to put together the 2023 edition, especially with some of the kits that I have come to learn about or ones that are planned for release later this year.

The list below is not an exhaustive by any means, but I did try to look for unique kits that folks may not be aware of and/or that include interesting capabilities or designs that would support VMware ESXi without issues and be able to run various other VMware products on top like vSAN, NSX, Aria and Tanzu.

While pricing is just one of the many factors in the hardware decision process, I did limit the scope to the base kit costing sub-$2,000 USD. I also wanted to make sure that the latest ESXi releases will install and run without any issues, which is typically governed by the model of the onboard network adapter. Therefore, any system that requires an additional USB network adapter to install ESXi is automatically excluded from the list. The size and form factor is also just as important and most of the kits below take up very little space or can easily be mobile, if needed.

If there are other new kits that have been released or planned for 2023 that you feel should make the list, be sure to leave a comment below.

[Read more...]

Categories // Home Lab Tags // homelab

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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Recent

  • How to disable the Efficiency Cores (E-cores) on an Intel NUC? 03/24/2023
  • Changing the default HTTP(s) Reverse Proxy Ports on ESXi 8.0 03/22/2023
  • NFS Multi-Connections in vSphere 8.0 Update 1 03/20/2023
  • Quick Tip - How to download ESXi ISO image for all releases including patch updates? 03/15/2023
  • SSD with multiple NVMe namespaces for VMware Homelab 03/14/2023

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