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Quick Tip - How to monitor when ESXi filesystem and partitions are filling up?

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Here is another tidbit on how you can leverage the power of vSphere Events, which now includes over 2K+ as of vSphere 8.0 Update 1 to help monitor when an ESXi filesystem and/or partition is low on disk space.

With vSphere 6.7 or later, we have two events that you can use to help alert when either an ESXi ramdisk (e.g. /var) or VFAT partition (e.g. bootbanks) has filled up.

  • Ramdisk: esx.problem.visorfs.ramdisk.full
  • VFAT: esx.problem.vfat.filesystem.full.other

When either of these occur, you can easily find them under the Monitor->Events section for an ESXi host as shown in the screenshot below.

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Frigate NVR with Coral TPU & iGPU passthrough using ESXi on Intel NUC

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For the past couple of weeks, I have been investigating some issues reported by the community when using ESXi with the popular Google Coral Edge TPU for accelerating machine learning (ML) inferencing. Fortunately, with the help from one of our engineers, Songtao, we were able to find a solution! You can find the complete write-up HERE and it also works with the latest ESXi 8.0 Update 1 release.

I was actually surprised at how popular the combination of the Google TPU and ESXi was from the community, which I guess should not come as a surprise, especially with the capabilities of ESXi coupled with all the interests in AI/ML these days.


Another popular use case of the Google TPU, which I had recently learned about is for real-time AI object detection using the Frigate NVR (Network Video Recorder) software, which is a commonly deployed solution that enable various home security and automation capabilities.

In fact, during a conversation with my buddy Alan Renouf, who is a Product Manager focused on running modern Edge workloads and is also a Frigate user, I discovered that the Frigate stack, which encompasses inferencing, video decoding, and the integration of cameras and sensors, closely resembles the components that you would find in many Edge deployments with simliar set of use cases.

Funny enough, I ended up leveraging a lot of my existing work with running ESXi on Intel NUCs and iGPU passthrough, while learning about and setting up Frigate! This was definitely an interesting project to explore and as shared, I now have a complete working setup with the full setup and write-up below.

JFYI - I have already submitted a PR 6576 to update the Frigate ESXi documentation as it is severely out of date and help folks quickly find the latest setup instructions.

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Refresher on Nested ESXi Networking Requirements

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Using Nested Virtualization and specifically Nested ESXi, which is running ESXi inside of a VM, has become so automatic and second nature for me and many in the VMware community, that I sometimes forget we still have brand new users who are experiencing ESXi for the very first time.

Nested ESXi is an extremely powerful capability for so many different use cases from development, testing and general learning purposes. Before jumping in and deploying your Nested ESXi environment, which I highly recommend using my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances, you need to make sure that you have proper networking setup or you will run into all sorts of strange issues. For all VMware Nested Virtualization resources, tips and tricks, you will definitely want to bookmark this page HERE.

Disclaimer: Nested Nested ESXi is not officially supported by VMware and Nested Virtualization is only supported under limited scenarios. For more details, please refer to this VMware KB 2009916.

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