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Update on Intel NUC 7th Gen (Kaby Lake) & ESXi 6.x

02.15.2017 by William Lam // 28 Comments

Intel just started shipping their i3 7th Gen (Kaby Lake) Intel NUCs and no surprise, Florian of virten.net has already gotten his hands on a unit for testing. The Intel NUCs is a very popular platform for running vSphere/vSAN-based home labs, especially for their price point and footprint. Last week, Florian discovered from his testing that the built-in network adapter on the 7th Gen NUC was not being detected by any of the ESXi installers and had published his findings here.

Since the Intel NUC is not an officially supported platform for ESXi, it does not surprise me that these sort of things happen, even if the NUC had a pretty good track record going back to the 5th Gen releases. Nonetheless, I reached out to Florian to see if he can provide me with a vm-support bundle and see if there was anything I could do to help.

A couple of Engineers took a look and quickly identified the issue with the Kabylake NIC (8086:15d8) but before getting to the solution, I did want to clarify something. The Kabylake NIC is actually NOT an officially supported NIC for ESXi and although it currently shows up in the VMware HCL, it is a mistake. I have been told the VMware HCL will be updated shortly to reflect this, apologies for any confusion that this may have caused.

Ok, so the great news is that we do have a solution for getting ESXi to recognize the built-in NIC on the 7th Gen Intel NUCs. The semi-bad news is that we currently do not have a solution in the short term for any released version of ESXi, as the fix will require an updated version of the e1000e Native Driver which will only be available in a future update of ESXi. I can not provide any timelines, but keep an eye on this blog and I will publish more details once they are available.

In the meantime, if you already own a 7th Gen NUC, there is a workaround which Florian has already blogged about here which uses the USB Ethernet Adapter VIB for the initial ESXi installation. If you are planning to purchase the 7th Gen NUC and would like to wait for folks to confirm the fix, then I would recommend holding off or potentially looking at the 6th Gen if you can not wait. Thanks to Florian and others who shared their experiences with the 7th Gen NUC and also to the VMware Engineers who found a quick resolution to the problem.

UPDATE (07/27/17) - The updated e1000e Native Driver that was included in ESXi 6.0 Update 3 is now included in ESXi 6.5 Update 1 which just GA'ed. You should be able to install ESXi without require any additional modifications to the latest Intel NUCs.

UPDATE (02/24/17) - An updated e1000e driver which contains a fix for 7th Gen NUC is now available as part of ESXi 6.0 Update 3, below are several options in how you can consume the driver.

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USB 3.0 Ethernet Adapter (NIC) driver for ESXi 6.5

11.17.2016 by William Lam // 189 Comments

I had several folks ask me about an updated USB 3.0 Ethernet Driver for ESXi 6.5, similar to what I had created for ESXi 5.5 and 6.0. There were some changes that came with ESXi 6.5 and thanks to Songtao, I was able to build a new driver. For those of you who are not familiar with this particular driver, I highly recommend you give this article here a read before proceeding any further. If you are interested in Realtek driver for ESXi 6.5, be sure to check out Jose's blog here for more info.

UPDATE (02/12/19) - A new VMware Native Driver for USB-based NICs has just been released for ESXi 6.5/6.7, please use this driver going forward. If you are still on ESXi 5.5/6.0, you can continue using the existing driver but please note there will be no additional development in the existing vmklinux-based driver.

UPDATE (04/23/18) - For folks who plan to upgrade or install ESXi 6.7, you can continue using the 6.5 driver. I've had several folks reach out and share there have not been any issues and upgrades will preserver the USB NIC driver or you can perform a fresh install and follow the steps below.

To use this new driver for ESXi 6.5, there are some additional steps that is required. Below are the instructions on how to install this on an ESXi 6.5 host.

Step 0 - Download the ESXi 6.5 USB Ethernet Adapter Driver VIB or ESXi 6.5 USB Ethernet Adapter Driver Offline Bundle and upload it to your ESXi host.

Step 1 - If you are upgrading from an existing ESXi 5.5 or 6.0 environment, the first thing you will want to do is uninstall the old driver by running the following command (specify the correct name of the driver):

esxcli software vib remove -n vghetto-ax88179-esxi60u2

Step 2 - Install the VIB by running the following ESXCLI command to install:

esxcli software vib install -v /vghetto-ax88179-esxi65.vib -f

Step 3 - Next, you will need to disable the USB native driver to be able to use this driver. To do so, run the following command:

esxcli system module set -m=vmkusb -e=FALSE

Step 4 - Lastly, for the changes to go into effect, you will need to reboot your ESXi host. Once your system has rebooted, it should now automatically load the USB Ethernet driver and you should see your USB Ethernet Adapter as shown in the screenshot below.

Step 5 - ESXi does not natively support USB NIC and upon a reboot, the USB NICs are not picked up until much later in the boot process which prevents them from being associated with VSS/VDS and their respective portgroups. To ensure things are connected properly after a reboot, you will need to add something like the following in /etc/rc.local.d/local.sh which re-links the USB NIC along with the individual portgroups as shown in the example below.

esxcfg-vswitch -L vusb0 vSwitch0
esxcfg-vswitch -M vusb0 -p "Management Network" vSwitch0
esxcfg-vswitch -M vusb0 -p "VM Network" vSwitch0

You will also need to run /sbin/auto-backup.sh to ensure the configuration changes are saved and then you can issue a reboot to verify that everything is working as expected.

Virtual NVMe and Nested ESXi 6.5?

10.26.2016 by William Lam // 4 Comments

After publishing my Nested ESXi enhancements for vSphere 6.5 article, I had received a number of questions on whether the new Virtual NVMe (vNVMe) capability introduced in the upcoming vSphere 6.5 release would also work with a Nested ESXi VM? The answer is yes, similiar to PVSCSI and VMXNET3, we also have an NVMe driver for ESXi running in VM.

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

To consume the new vNVMe for a Nested ESXi VM, you will need to use the latest ESXi 6.5 and later compatibility (vHW 13). Once that has been done, you can then add the a new NVMe Controller to your Nested ESXi VM and then assign that to one of the virtual disks as shown in the screenshot below.

Next, you would install ESXi 6.5 as you normally would and the NVMe controller will automatically be detected and driver will be loaded. In the example below, you can see I only have a single disk which ESXi itself is installed on and it is backed by the NVMe Controller.

One of the biggest benefit of using an NVMe interface over the traditional SCSI is that it can significantly reduce the amount of overhead compared to the SCSI protocol which in turn consumes less CPU cycles as well as reducing the overall amount of IO latency for your VM workloads. Obviously, when using it inside of a Nested ESXi VM, YMMV but hopefully you should also see an improvement there as well. For those who plan to give this a try in their environment, it would be good to hear what type of use cases you might have in mind for this and if you have any feedback (good/bad), feel free to leave a comment.