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GPU Passthrough of Radeon RX Vega M in Intel Hades Canyon

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With the latest Intel Hades Canyon now being able to run ESXi, a number of folks have been interested in taking advantage of the integrated GPU that is included in the system. There are two models of the Hades Canyon, NUC8i7HNK which is the lower end system with Radeon RX Vega M and the NUC8i7HVK which is the higher end system with Radeon RX Vega GH. One of the first thing I had attempted after getting ESXi working on the Hades Canyon was to try to enable passthrough of the iGPU into a Windows GuestOS but in all my attempts, it resulted into a PSOD'ing the ESXi host once you start installing the AMD Drivers from Intel.

A few days ago, one of my readers, Chris78 shared an update where he was able to prevent the ESXi host from PSOD'ing by adding a VM Advanced Setting but he he was still having issues where the Windows GuestOS would now BSOD. This sounded promising, I figure it would not hurt to gave it a try and to my surprise, I was able to successfully passthrough the iGPU to a Windows 10, Windows Server 2016 and 2019 system from my limited testing. After reporting the success back to Chris78 who was still having issues even after using the settings I had used, his conclusion was there may be a difference between the HNK and HVK models, with the latter having BSOD issues. For now, it seems like iGPU can only be passthrough if you have the NUC8i7HNK model.

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ESXi on the new 2018 Apple Mac Mini

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Thanks to the Green Mini Host (Apple Mac Mini hosting and collocation provider) who were the first to publicly confirm that latest release of ESXi (6.7 Update 1) works on the recently announced 2018 Apple Mac Mini.

For vSphere/vSAN Home Lab enthusiasts, the price of the new Mac Mini, especially when it is fully loaded is probably a tough sale. However, for customers developing on MacOS including iOS development, CI/CD, build farms, gaming, etc. which benefit from running on vSphere. For these customers, support for ESXi on the new Mac Mini is extremely interesting, especially with the updated hardware giving these systems a significant boost in performance even when comparing to the current Mac Pro 6,1 and iMac Pro models. In fact, I had number of folks ping me after Apple introduced it during their keynote asking if ESXi would work on the Mini's.

UPDATE (06/25/20) - The Apple 2018 Mac Mini 8,1 is now officially on the VMware HCL and is fully supported with ESXi 7.0b, which contains the fixes mentioned above. See note below on 06/23 for more information.

UPDATE (06/23/20) - ESXi 7.0b has just been released and contains fixes for both the MacOS guest boot issue support for Thunderbolt 3 devices which now enables support for the vSphere 7 release. One additional enhancement, customers no longer need to configure the ESXi Advanced Setting to enable Thunderbolt 3 support, this is now automatically configured based on detecting an Apple hardware system such as an Apple Mac Mini 2018 or Apple Mac Pro 2019. This is a patch release and you will need to go to the VMware Patch Portal site to download and apply the update.

UPDATE (04/28/20) - ESXi 6.7 Patch 02 resolves a number of the issues mentioned below, please take a look at this blog post here for more details.

Disclaimer: 2018 Apple Mac Mini are NOT officially supported by VMware. The only officially supported Apple hardware platform is the Mac Pro 6,1 or Mac Pro 5,1 and Mac Mini 6,2 or Mac Mini 7,1. For more details, please refer to VMware's Hardware Compatibility List.

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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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