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How to enable passthrough for USB Network Adapters claimed by ESXi CDCE Driver?

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As part of vSphere 7.0, ESXi now ships with a USB CDCE (Communication Device Class Ethernet) driver which can benefit customers with SB network adapters that support the CDCE specification as shared in this blog post HERE. This can especially be useful for those running a VMware Homelab where the onboard network adapter may not be supported and using a CDCE USB network adapter would allow you to install ESXi.

When a CDCE-supported USB network adapter is connected to an ESXi host, it will automatically be claimed by the CDCE driver as shown in the screenshot below.


If you are planning to use the USB network adapter for VMkernel traffic, then there is no workflow change like any other physical network adapter. However, if you intend to passthrough the USB network adapter to a VM, then you may find that it is not working as expected.


The reason for this is that ESXi has already claimed the USB device, assuming you wish to use it for VMkernel traffic. To change the behavior for a particular CDCE-supported USB network adapter, we just need to apply a USB Quirk which tells ESXi to ignore this adapter.

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ESXi on Intel NUC 13 Pro (Arena Canyon)

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A new year means a new Intel NUC with the latest generation of processors from Intel.


Today, Intel has launched the new Intel NUC 13 Pro, previously codenamed Arena Canyon NUC, which incorporates the latest Intel 13th Generation Raptor Lake CPU mobile processors and delivering that in the classic 4x4 Intel NUC form factor that many in the VMware community are quite familiar with.

At first glance, the Intel NUC 13 Pro looks exactly the same as the previous Intel NUC 12 Pro generation. In fact, the only visible difference on the outside between the 12th and 13th Generation Intel NUC Pro is that the Intel NUC 13 now has a new etched Intel NUC logo that is located on the top of the case on the lower left as shown in the screenshot above. Obviously, the changes with the Intel NUC 13 Pro is from within, so lets now take a closer look at the newest Intel NUC Pro and what it has to offer from a VMware Homelab perspective.

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

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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!

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