WilliamLam.com

ESXi on Minisforum MS-01

by // 43 Comments

In recent years, there have been a number of new players that have entered the mini PC market that have really been pushing the boundaries on small form factor systems. Minisforum is one such company, that was founded in 2018 and have been steadily producing more interesting kits to compete with some of the more established vendors in this space.

Early on, the kits from Minisforum were pretty comparable (compute, network and storage capabilities) with other vendors using the popular 4x4 design, pioneered by Intel with their Intel NUC platform. With each new generation of mini PCs from Minisforum, the chassis aesthetics started to become more unique and they started to have more differentiated offerings like broader CPU choices including some of the latest AMD desktop and mobile processors.

Even I was intrigued by some of Minisforum offers from a VMware perspective, but unfortunately Minisforum had no interest in collaborating when I had reached out a while back. Over the years, I stayed informed of new releases from Minisforum but nothing really stood out to me as much as their recent announcement of the Minisforums Workstation MS-01.


UPDATE (03/05/2024) - SimplyNUC has just launched the Onyx Pro, which is nothing more than a rebrand of the Minisforums MS-01 and review here would also apply to SimplyNUC OnyxPro.

[Read more...]

Experimenting with ESXi CPU affinity and Intel Hybrid CPU Cores

by // 21 Comments

After debugging a recent issue with using VMware Workstation and Intel Hybrid CPUs, it gave me an idea about an experiment to try with ESXi and Intel Hybrid CPUs.

As a refresher, starting with the Intel 12th Generation (Alder Lake) CPU, a new hybrid big.LITTLE CPU architecture was introduced for consumer Intel CPUs. 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. The ESXi scheduler does not and has no current plans to support this new Intel Hybrid CPU architecture, especially as this type of architecture is nowhere to be found in traditional Enterprise datacenters and is only limited to Intel Consumer CPUs.

The current recommendation to work around the non-uniformity of the CPU cores is to either disable the E or P-cores within the system BIOS, thus making the system "uniform" and allowing ESXi to run like a normal x86 system. While you can apply a workaround to have ESXi ignore the non-uniformity of the CPU cores, in addition to the non-deterministic behaviors, random PSOD can also occur due to scheduling across two different types of cores.

I was curious to see whether applying ESXi CPU affinity on a VM using Intel Hybrid CPU Cores might yield a different outcome?

[Read more...]

Quick Tip - New method to mark HDD to SSD in ESXi 7.x and 8.x using ESXCLI

by // 3 Comments

I recently helped a colleague who wanted to mark an HDD device in ESXi to show up as an SSD, which may be needed if the storage device was not correctly detected or if you are using Nested ESXi and the underlying storage is not an SSD and you need to mark it as an SSD for use with vSAN OSA or ESA.

The easiest way to accomplish this operation is by using the vSphere UI, but that does require vCenter Server to be up and running, which it was not. Alternatively, you can also perform this operation using ESXCLI and configure an Storage Array-Type Plugin (SATP) claim rules, which had been possible since 2013 but it looks like the old method no longer works in the latest ESXi 7.x and 8.x releases.

Note: If you are configuring this for a Nested ESXi VM, another method is to emulate a virtual SSD as shown in this blog post.

[Read more...]