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First look at the new Supermicro E302-12D (Ice Lake D)

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The Intel Xeon D embedded SoC product line is an amazing platform and has been extremely popular amongst VMware customers for VMware Homelabs and running workloads both in the Datacenter and at the Edge using kits like the Supermicro E200-8D and E300-9D to just name a few. While the E200-8D/E300-9D still remain popular, they are slowly coming up on their end of life support, Q1 2023 and Q1 2025 respectively.

Intel Ice Lake D is the first major architectural refresh of the Intel Xeon D product line, which is quite exciting for those looking to upgrade and take advantage of all the latest hardware capabilities this new platform as to offer! Two Ice Lake D kits that I am really excited for is the Supermicro E300-12D and E302-12D, both of which leverage the new Ice Lake D SoC. As a E200-8D owner, my only real nit pick is with the noise of the fans which can sound like a jet engine when using the stock fans. Although I have replaced the stock fans with the much quieter Noctua fans, under higher load the system is still audible and some in the community have also reported that it may still not be enough to cool system.

If I had to start all over again, I certainly would be looking at one of the new fanless kit from Supermicro! I was fortunate enough to get my hands on the upcoming Supermicro E302-12D system, a fanless Ice Lake D kit which has a similiar design to the existing E300-9D.

So here is your first sneak peak at this new Ice Lake D platform! 😀

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Quick Tip - How to actually disable host encryption mode on ESXi?

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This recent quote from my buddy Timo Sugliani (definitely worth a follow on Twitter), perfectly captures the essence of an issue that I had ran into and I am sure many of you can also relate! 😀

Trying to do ONE thing and deviating to X, Y and Z. The common IT Journey

I was trying to generate an ESXi support bundle to share with Engineering and when ran the "vm-support" command, I was surprised that it failed with the following message:

Command cannot succeed because this host is in crypto safe mode and the vm-support incident key is missing.


I had never seen this message before and I had assumed it was probably due to my recent use of adding vTPM to VM that caused the host encryption mode to get enabled on this particular ESXi host. Although there were commands that I could run follow, I actually just wanted to disable it and get the support bundle over to Engineering. I figure I should be able to easily disable it, right?

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Exploring the Cloud-init Datasource for VMware GuestInfo using vSphere

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While exploring some upcoming capabilities and providing early feedback to Engineering, I came to learn about a new Cloud-init datasource called VMware GuestInfo that was recently merged into the project last August. The Cloud-init Datasource for VMware GuestInfo started out as an OSS project created by Andrew Kutz of VMware and it provides an easy way for a vSphere-based VM to leverage the popular Cloud-init tool for OS initialization and configuration. 

Unlike the recent vSphere Guest OS Customization with Cloud-init feature in vSphere 7.0 Update 3, the Cloud-init Datasource for VMware GuestInfo works by configuring specific guestinfo variables on a VM which are then transported into the guest operating system (GOS) using VMware Tools and is then processed by the cloud-init service that is running inside of the GOS. The nice thing about using this new Cloud-init datasource is that it is not tied to a specific release of vSphere and for those with Cloud-init experience, this is an easy way to incorporate your existing workflows. While I was somewhat familiar with Cloud-init and Linux GOS, I did not know that support for Microsoft Windows was also possible through the use of another project similiar to Cloud-Init called Cloudbase-Init.

It took me some time to figure out how to setup Cloudbase-init with Windows and I have to give a huge shoutout to Jay Vyas for pointing me over to one of his pet projects SIG Windows Development Environment that provided a clue to what the configuration file should look like. While learning about both Cloud-init Datasource for VMware GuestInfo and Cloudbase-init, I found that it was not trivial to get started and I wanted to document some concrete examples that can easily illustrate the power of this capability but also help anyone that might be interested in using this feature and how to quickly get started.

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