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Update on running ESXi on Intel NUC Hades Canyon (NUC8i7HNK & NUC8i7HVK)

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The Intel NUC is one of the most popular and affordable hardware platform for running vSphere and vSAN Home Labs. For customers that want a bit more computing power, Intel also has their Skull Canyon platform which was released back in 2016 and has also gained in popularity amongst VMware Home Labbers. To be clear, the none of the Intel NUC platforms are on VMware HCL and therefore are not officially supported.

Earlier this year, Intel released their second generation of their higher-end Intel NUCs dubbed Hades Canyon which comes in two flavors NUC8i7HNK and NUC8i7HVK, with the latter being the higher-end unit. Based on the previous generation of hardware, most customers assumed ESXi should just work and went out and purchased the lower-end "HNK" version just to find out that was not case. The ESXi Installer would boot up to a certain point and then stop with the following error:

“Shutting down firmware services…..

Using “simple offset” UEFI RTS mapping policy”

To add to the confusion, this issue was not observed with the higher-end NUC8i7HVK model which was also quite interesting. Over on the nucblog.net, they also confirmed ESXi runs fine on "HVK" model and the issue seems to be isolated to the lower-end "HNK" model.

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Useful M.2 NVMe accessories for vSphere (VSAN/VMFS) Home Labs

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I recently acquired a new toy for the home lab thanks to Timo Sugliani who shared an article on Twitter a few weeks back for a new USB-based enclosure that supports an NVMe SSD device using the M.2 form factor.

I was excited to give the accessory a try, especially as the M.2 devices are used regularly for  vSphere home labs running on either the Intel NUCs or Supermicro E200-8D. Most of these platforms only support a single M.2 slot and this is an easy way to add additional high performance storage capacity with a small footprint. The other benefit with an external enclosure is that you now have a portable and reliable storage solution that can easily be moved from system to system, especially for those that have asked about running VMFS on USB-based device.

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Automated Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Lab Deployment 

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While working on my Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) blog series awhile back, one of the things I was also working on was some automation to help build out the required infrastructure NSX-T (Manager, Controller & Edge), Nested ESXi hosts configured with VSAN for the Compute vSphere Cluster and Pivotal Ops Manager. This was not only useful for my own learning purposes, but that I could easily rebuild my lab if I had messed something up and allowed me to focus more on the PKS solution rather than standing up the infrastructure itself.

To be honest, I had about 95% of the script done but I was not able to figure out one of the NSX-T APIs and I got busy and had left the script on the back burner. This past weekend while cleaning out some of my PKS research documents, I came across the script and funny enough, in about 30minutes I was able to solve the problem which I was stuck for weeks prior. I just finished putting the final touches on the script along with adding some documentation. Simliar to my other vGhetto Lab Automation scripts, I have created a Github repo vGhetto Automated PKS Lab Deployment

UPDATE (06/19/18) - I have just updated the script to also include the deployment and configuration of the PKS components (Ops Manager, BOSH Director, Harbor & Stemcell). The script by default will now configure everything end-2-end and you will have a fully functional PKS environment that you can start playing around with. For complete details, please see the Github repo which has the updated requirements and documentation. Below is a screenshot of the PKS deployment and configuration which requires the use of the Ops Manager CLI (OM).


The script will deploy the following components which will be placed inside of a vApp as shown in the screenshot below:

  • NSX-T Manager
  • NSX-T Controller x 3 (though you technically only need one for lab/poc purposes)
  • NSX-T Edge
  • Nested ESXi VMs x 3 (VSAN will be configured)
  • Ops Manager


The script follows my PKS blog series and automates Part 3 (NSX-T) and the start of Part 4 (Ops Manager deploy), please refer to these individual blog posts for more information. The goal of the script is to enable folks to jump right into the PKS configuration workflows and not have to worry about setting up the actual infrastructure that is needed for PKS. Once the script has finished, you can jump right into Ops Manager and start your PKS journey.

Here is a sample execution of the script which took ~29 minutes to complete.


The full requirements for using the script be found on the Github repo and below are the software versions that I had used to deploy and configure PKS: