In addition to the big announcements from yesterday on major simplification of the new VMware by Broadcom offers and licensing model and the new chapter for the VMware Desktop Hypervisor products, I have one more piece of exciting news that I would like to share with our users, just in time for the holidays! 🎁
ESXi on iKOOLCORE R2
I first wrote about the tiny palm size iKOOLCORE R1 back in Spring of this year, I was pretty impressed at how capable the R1 was, especially given the tiny footprint that is slightly taller than a Lego minifigure!
It has not even been a full year since the release of the R1 and the second generation of the R-Series is now available, not surprisingly dubbed the R2.
Heads Up - ESXi 8.0 Update 2 requires XSAVE CPU instruction even with allowLegacyCPU=true
As shared back in 2022 in my Homelab Considerations for vSphere 8.x blog post, if you attempt to install ESXi on system where the CPU is no longer being supported by the OEM vendor, who then informs VMware on what to publish on the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide (VCG), you will see the following error message preventing you from proceeding.
Also mentioned in that article, you can override this default behavior with the following ESXi boot option: allowLegacyCPU=true which would convert this from an error to warning message but allowing you to proceed in an installation or upgrade.
Obviously, this is not officially supported by VMware and its behavior was never guarantee but it certainly was a nice gesture, in my humble opinion from Engineering, as they could have easily not allowed any override based on on our official VCG. For homelab use cases, it might be okay to use a CPU that is 5 to 6 years old, knowing that it should be replaced hopefully in the near future.
I just had a couple of users report issues while upgrading to the latest ESXi 8.0 Update 2 release when using the allowLegacyCPU boot option and saw the following error message
VMB: 716: Unsupported CPU
The ESXi installer immediately halts and prevents the upgrade from proceeding ...
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