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Alan Renouf, and his family, need your help. Please support/donate!

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In case you have not heard, the Bay Area has recently been affected by a number of unprecedented wildfires which has destroyed several hundred thousands acres of land and is no where near containment. Thousands of families have been affected and this week, we found out our good friend Alan Renouf was also impacted and sadly lost his home in the fires.

Luckily, Alan and his family is safe, but as you can see from the devastation below (yes, this was actually his house on the left), it will take a long time to rebuild if that is even possible.


I know many of you know Alan for his work in PowerCLI, vSphere Automation and more recently his efforts in the VMware Office of CTO for Project VXR focused on Virtual and Augmented Reality. Like many, I have also benefited from Alan's work and if you feel the same way and would like to help him and his family out, please consider donating to the GoFundme page below. Like many of the affected families, they are currently staying in a hotel which is being paid out of their own pockets and any amount will go a long way! Please consider sharing this with others in your community that may be able to help and thank you for your help.

Direct GoFundMe URL: https://www.gofundme.com/f/renouf-fire-relief-fund

USB Network Native Driver Fling for ESXi v1.6

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The popular USB Native Driver Fling for ESXi has just been updated to version 1.6 and is one of our larger releases.

Here are some of the key new features, for complete list, please refer to the Changelog tab on the Fling site.

  • Support for 4 additional USB NICs including the highly requested RTL8156 which is a 2.5GbE USB NIC and can be found on Amazon for as low as $25 USD. For more details, please refer to Requirements tab on the Fling site.
  • Support for persisting VMkernel to USB NIC MAC Address mappings which was an issue when using multiple USB NICs. Upon reboot, ESXi may randomize the mappings which can cause issues. For more details on this feature, please refer to the Instructions tab on the Fling site.
  • Simplified method for persisting USB NIC bindings. For more details, please refer to the Instructions tab on the Fling site.

Disabling TPM 2.0 connection cannot be established message in ESXi for Intel NUC 10

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For Intel NUC 10 (Frost Canyon) owners who have installed ESXi may have noticed that even after disabling Intel's Trusted Platform Module (TPM), the following warning message "TPM 2.0 device detected but a connection cannot be established." is still being displayed in the vSphere UI as shown in the screenshot below. 


Thanks to Reddit member mscaff and casperette who recently discovered and confirmed that the latest BIOS (FN0044) resolves an issue where disabling TPM in the BIOS was not actually working which would explain the behavior observed above. The really interesting thing is that I had initially ran into this problem several months back and after speaking with some internal VMware folks, I was able to get rid of this message without this update. This involved installing Windows 10 and clear the TPM keys which may have still been cache but since then, it has not been reproducible by other folks. In any case, it is always recommended to check and update to latest BIOS to ensure you have all the latest bug fixes.

Lastly, Intel states support for TPM 2.0 for these NUCs, so why is ESXi complaining? Well, it has to do with the interface type and not with SHA1 vs SHA256 which are both supported on the NUC 10. The NUC only supports CRB but proper compliant TPM 2.0 chip must support FIFO which is not configurable the last time I had checked. For more detail requirements and configuration of TPM 2.0 on ESXi, please refer to this blog post.