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New Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling

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I am super excited to announce the release of a new Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling! The idea behind this project started about a year ago when we released an enhancement to the ne1000 driver as a community update which enabled ESXi to recognize the onboard network adapter for the Intel 10th Gen (Frost Canyon) NUC. Although the Intel NUC is not an officially supported VMware platform, it is extremely popular amongst the VMware Community. In working with the awesome Songtao, we were able to release this driver early last year for customers to take advantage of the latest Intel NUC release.

At the time, I knew that this would not be the last occurrence dealing with driver compatibility. We definitely wanted an easier way to distribute various community networking drivers that is packaged into a single deliverable for customers to easily consume and hence this project was born. In fact, it was quite timely as I had just received engineering samples of the new Intel NUC 11 Pro and Performance (Panther Canyon and Tiger Canyon) at the end of 2020 and work needed to be done before we could enable the onboard 2.5GbE (multi-gigabit) network adapter which is a default component of the new Intel Tiger Lake architecture. As reported back in early Jan, Songtao and colleague Shu were successful in getting ESXi to recognize the new 2.5GbE network adapter and has also been incorporated into this new Fling. In addition, we also started to receive reports from customers that after upgrading to a newer ESXi 7.0 releases, the onboard network adapters for the Intel 8th Gen NUC was no longer functioning. In an effort to help customers with this older platform, we have also updated the original community ne1000e driver to include the relevant PCI IDs within this Fling.


The new Community Networking Driver for ESXi is for PCIe-based network adapters and currently contains the following two driver modules:

  • igc-community - which adds support for Intel 11th Gen NUCs and any other hardware platform that uses the same 2.5GbE devices
  • e1000-community - which adds support for Intel 8th Gen NUC and any other hardware platform that uses same 1GbE devices

For a complete list of supported devices (VendorID/ProductID), please take a look at the Requirements tab on the Fling website. As with any Fling, this is being developed and supported in our spare time. In the future, we may consider adding other types of devices based on feedback from the broader community. I know Realtek-based PCIe NICs is something that many have been asking about and as mentioned back in this blog post, I have been in engaged with the Realtek team and hopefully in the near future, we may see an ESXi driver that can support some of the more popular devices in the community. If there are other PCIe-based networking adapters that could fit the Fling model, feel free to leave a comment on the Fling website and we can evaluate as time permits.

E100-9W - A new fanless Supermicro "NUC" platform

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At the end of 2020, I had published a blog article which covers the latest Supermicro kits that are being used and others that can be used for both VMware Homelabs as well as for production workloads. The article was very well received, especially as this is a topic that I frequently get questions about on the latest hardware kits that will work with vSphere, vSAN and NSX-T.

While researching for the article, I had a chance to speak with the Supermicro Product Manager and I came to learn about a new E100-9W platform that was just released last Spring of 2020. This platform is part of Supermicro's Embedded IoT family of servers and focuses on use cases such as Industrial Automation, Retail, Smart Medical Systems, Kiosks and Digital Signage to name a few. Many of these use cases are also applicable to our VMware customer base, especially for running a small and lower power footprint at an Edge or ROBO location. I was also interested in this platform as it could also be interesting for VMware homelabs.


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ESXi on 11th Gen Intel NUC (Panther Canyon) & (Tiger Canyon)

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The highly anticipated 11th Generation Intel NUCs based on the new Tiger Lake processors has just been announced by Intel and I am excited to share my first hand experience with this new NUC platform. There are currently two models in the new 11th Gen lineup: the Intel NUC 11 Performance codenamed Panther Canyon (pictured on the left) which is the successor to the 10th Gen (Frost Canyon) NUC and the Intel NUC 11 Pro codenamed Tiger Canyon (pictured on the right) which is the successor to the 8th Gen (Provo Canyon) NUC.


There are a number of new improvements and capabilities that will make these new NUCs quite popular for anyone looking to build or upgrade their vSphere environment in 2021.

Before diving right in, I must say I love the new aesthetic look of the NUC chassis. In previous versions, the lid had a glossy and shiny finish, which easily left hand prints. These new models now have a clean matte finish. The NUC 11 Performance has a smoother feel compared to the NUC 11 Pro which has more of a texture to the finish, which I personally prefer. The other noticeable change is the power adapter, which is now half the size now which is nice for those looking to have several of these new kits sitting next to each other.

UPDATE (08/23/21) - For those interested in purchasing the Intel NUC 11 Expansion Module, GoRite is a vendor who is now selling this accessory that I was recently made aware of.

UPDATE (02/17/21) - The Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling has been released and is required for ESXi to recognize the new onboard 2.5GbE network adapter on all Intel NUC 11 models

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