WilliamLam.com

New storage devices added to Community NVMe Driver for ESXi Fling

by // 27 Comments

We have an exciting update for the VMware Community today with the release of the Community NVMe Driver for ESXi Fling v1.1. After the release of ESXi 6.7, a number of consumer NVMe devices were no longer bering detected which had previously worked with ESXi 6.5.

One workaround that many folks had to implement, including myself, was to replace the 6.7 NVMe driver. with the previous 6.5 version of the NVMe driver. Although this method still works with the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 2, it is less than ideal as you are using an extremely old version of the NVMe driver and you are giving up new NVMe device enablement, bug fixes and enhancements with the latest version of the driver.

Given the amount of comments and feedback that I had received in the previous blog post, I wanted to explore a way in which we can enable some of these consumer NVMe devices for the community. With the help from Yibo, we have updated the Community NVMe Driver for ESXi Fling to include support for the following storage devices:

[Read more...]

Packer reference for VMware Harbor Virtual Appliance

by // 2 Comments

I recently had a need to setup a container registry for a project that I was working on and Harbor was of course my default choice. Although Harbor is pretty easy to setup, I did not want to manually go through the installation each time I needed Harbor and I figured it was time to build my own Harbor Virtual Appliance (OVA), just like I have shown in the past with these reference implementations here and here.

UPDATE (02/03/23) - VMware has productized and is now shipping an official VMware Harbor Virtual Appliance (OVA) as part of the latest Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (2.1) release.

For those interested, you can find the reference implementation for building a Harbor Virtual Appliance at https://github.com/lamw/harbor-appliance

When deploying the Harbor Appliance, you will find the basic OVF properties that I have encoded including networking, credentials, debugging and advanced settings. Hopefully should be pretty straight forward for anyone who has deployed an OVA before to vSphere.

[Read more...]

Passthrough of Intel Iris Xe Integrated GPU on 11th Gen NUC results in Error Code 43

by // 49 Comments

I recently ran into an issue after enabling ESXi passthrough of the new Intel Iris Xe Integrated GPU (iGPU), which is available with the latest Intel 11th Gen Pro (Tiger Canyon) NUC and SimplyNUC Topaz. After installing the latest Intel Graphics Driver and rebooting the Microsoft Windows 10 (20H2) VM, I noticed Microsoft Device Manager would show the iGPU device with the following error message:

Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)


Unfortunately, this generic error message was not very useful in identifying the underlying issue. I was hoping the process was going to be seamless like it was for enabling passthrough of the iGPU in Intel NUC 10 (Frost Canyon) NUC, especially with the higher execution units for the 11the Gen NUC i3 (48 EU), i5 (80 EU) and i7 (96 EU).

I currently have a case open with the Intel NUC team and see if they can help investigate the underlying issue for their driver. For the time being, it looks like passthrough of the new iGPU is not fully functional when using ESXi 7.0 Update 2 and I will update this blog post if/when I have further updates to share.